• Scientists have discovered a potential new state of matter that may help explain phenomena like superconductivity.

• Superconductivity is extensively used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), particle accelerators, magnetic fusion devices, and microwave filters.

• Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. showed that among superconducting materials in high magnetic fields, the phenomenon of electronic symmetry breaking is common.

  Essential ingredients

• The ability to find similarities and differences among classes of materials with phenomena such as this helps establish the essential ingredients that cause novel functionalities such as superconductivity.

• The high-magnetic-field state of the heavy fermion superconductor CeRhIn5 revealed a state in which the material’s electrons aligned in such a way to apparently reduce the symmetry of the original crystal, something that now appears to be universal among unconventional superconductors.

• Unconventional superconductivity develops near a phase boundary separating magnetically ordered and magnetically disordered phases of a material.

Source:TH