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Concept
Unconventional superconductor
Summary
Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which does not conform to conventional BCS theory or its extensions.
The superconducting properties of CeCu2Si2, a type of
heavy fermion material, were reported in 1979 by Frank Steglich. For a long time it was believed that CeCu2Si2 was a singlet d-wave superconductor, but since the mid 2010s, this notion has been strongly contested. In the early eighties, many more unconventional, heavy fermion superconductors were discovered, including UBe13, UPt3 and URu2Si2. In each of these materials, the anisotropic nature of the pairing was implicated by the power-law dependence of the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation rate and specific heat capacity on temperature. The presence of nodes in the superconducting gap of UPt3 was confirmed in 1986 from the polarization dependence of the ultrasound attenuation.
The first unconventional triplet superconductor, organic material (TMTSF)2PF6, was discovered by Denis Jerome, Klaus Bechgaard and coworkers in 1980. Experimental works by Paul Chaikin's and Michael Naughton's groups as well as theoretical analysis of their data by Andrei Lebed have firmly confirmed unconventional nature of superconducting pairing in (TMTSF)2X (X=PF6, ClO4, etc.) organic materials.
High-temperature singlet d-wave superconductivity was discovered by J.G. Bednorz and K.A. Müller in 1986, who also discovered that the lanthanum-based cuprate perovskite material LaBaCuO4 develops superconductivity at a critical temperature (Tc) of approximately 35 K (-238 degrees Celsius). This was well above the highest critical temperature known at the time (Tc = 23 K), and thus the new family of materials was called high-temperature superconductors. Bednorz and Müller received the Nobel prize in Physics for this discovery in 1987. Since then, many other high-temperature superconductors have been synthesized.
LSCO (La2−xSrxCuO4) was discovered the same year (1986).
Official source
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