Novel approach to non-uniform superconductivity

Superconductivity has fascinated scientists for many years both for fundamental reasons and because it offers the potential to revolutionize current technologies. Materials only become superconductors - meaning that electrons can travel in them with no resistance - at very low temperatures. These days, this unique zero resistance superconductivity is commonly found in a number of technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Future technologies, however, will harness the total synchrony of electronic behavior in superconductors - a property called the phase. There is currently a race to build the world's first quantum computer, which will use these phases to perform calculations. Conventional superconductors are very robust and hard to influence, and the challenge is to find new materials in which the superconducting state can be easily manipulated in a device. In work begun during his time at our Institute, Philip Moll (now a Professor at EPFL in Lausanne) set up a project on a special superconductor, CeIrIn₅, whose properties are unusually tunable.