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False alarms sounded recently about the discovery of a room temperature superconductor by way of a material called LK-99. Since then, there has been a surge in interest in the topic: what exactly is a room temperature superconductor? How would one change our lives? And just how close are we to discovering one? Stay Tuned in Brief podcaster and former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara speaks with physicist and superconductor expert Dr. Richard Greene of QMC. Podcast link
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Two QMC collaborations - with the Madhavan group at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and the Davis group at Cornell University, University College Cork and Oxford University - have found striking instances of charge- and pair-density wave orders in the topological spin-triplet superconductor UTe2 using scanning tunneling microscopy techniques. The Madhavan group, who previously discovered chiral superconductivity in this material, unveiled an unusual kind of charge-density-wave order that is closely associated with superconductivity and is sensitive to magnetic fields. The Davis group used a superconducting Nb tip to identify the presence of three pair density waves along the same directions as the Urbana charge density waves. Read more in Nature News & Views article "Widespread pair density waves spark superconductor search"
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Researchers in QMC, in collaboration with theorists at the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) and JQI, have produced the first experimental evidence that one metal—and likely others in its class—have electrons that manage to preserve a higher spin (j=3/2) angular momentum state in the topological half-Heusler semimetal YPtBi. A radical anisotropy observed in quantum oscillations in a highly isotropic system cannot be explained by conventional scenarios, but rather is naturally explained by the warping feature of the j=3/2 Fermi surface, providing direct proof of active high angular momentum quasiparticles that eventually superconduct. Read more in JQI News and in Physical Review Research.
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QMC Prof. Richard Greene has been named a Distinguished University Professor—the highest academic honor bestowed by the University of Maryland. This award is in recognition of his peerless Teaching, Leadership, Service and Research Achievements. (read more)
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Undergraduate researchers Emerson Hemley, Winslow Weiss and Yash Anand, as well as high school student Sarah Celaya, have been actively involved in quantum materials research in QMC. Congratulations to Winslow who is off to graduate school at Stanford, and to Sarah who off to Berkeley for undergraduate studies!