Ted Geballe has contributed enormously to the knowledge of superconducting materials during an illustrious scientific career spanning seven decades, encompassing groundbreaking discoveries and studies of both so-called conventional and unconventional superconductors. On the year of his 100th birthday I would like to argue that all superconducting materials that Ted investigated, as well as those he did not, have one thing in common that is not generally recognized: hole carriers. This includes $PbTe$ doped with $Tl$, for which Ted has proposed that superconductivity is driven by negative-U pairing. I will discuss why hole carriers are necessary for a material to be a superconductor, and the implications of this for the understanding of the fundamental physics of superconductivity.
A review of the phenomenology and microscopy of cuprate superconductors is presented, with particular attention to universal conductance features, which reveal the existence of two electronic subsystems. The overall electronic system consists of $1+p$ charges, where $p$ is the doping. At low dopings exactly one hole is localized per planar copper-oxygen unit, while upon increasing doping and temperature, the hole is gradually delocalized and becomes itinerant. Remarkably, the itinerant holes exhibit identical Fermi-liquid character across the cuprate phase diagram. This universality enables a …
Candidates for new thermoelectric and superconducting materials, which have narrow band gap and flat bands near band edges, were searched by the high-throughput first-principles calculation from an inorganic materials database. The synthesized SnBi$_2$Se$_4$ among the target compounds showed a narrow band gap of 354 meV, and a thermal conductivity of 1 W/Km at ambient pressure. The sample SnBi$_2$Se$_4$ showed a metal-insulator transition at 11.1 GPa, as predicted by a theoretical estimation. Furthermore, the two pressure-induced superconducting transitions were discovered at under 20.2 GPa an…
Superconducting materials hold great potential to bring radical changes for electric power and high-field magnet technology , enabling high-efficiency electric power generation, high-capacity lossless electric power transmission, small light-weighted electrical equipment, high-speed maglev transportation, ultra-strong magnetic field generation for high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems, the future advanced high energy particle accelerators, nuclear fusion reactors and so on. The performance, economy and operating parameters (temperatu…
Old susceptibility data, measured in superconducting materials at low-frequency, are shown to be accounted for consistently within the framework of a recently published\cite{sz1} analysis of the skin effect. Their main merit is to emphasize the significance of the skin-depth measurements, performed \textit{just beneath} the critical temperature $T_c$, in order to disprove an assumption, which thwarted any understanding of the skin-depth data, achieved so far by conventional high-frequency methods, so that those data might, from now on, give access to the temperature dependence of the concentra…
We present materials informatics approach to search for superconducting hydrogen compounds, which is based on a genetic algorithm and a genetic programming. This method consists of four stages: (i) search for stable crystal structures of materials by a genetic algorithm, (ii) collection of physical and chemical property data by first-principles calculations, (iii) development of superconductivity predictor based on the database by a genetic programming, and (iv) discovery of potential candidates by regression analysis. By repeatedly performing the process as (i) $\rightarrow$ (ii) $\rightarrow…
Spin resonance in the superconducting state of Fe-based materials within the multiorbital model with unequal anisotropic gaps on different Fermi surface sheets is studied. On the basis of the model gap function and the one calculated within the spin fluctuation theory of pairing, I show that the resonance peak shifts to higher frequencies with increasing the zero-amplitude gap magnitude. On the contrary, with increasing the gap anisotropy, it shifts to lower frequencies and lose some intensity.
The critical current density in type-II superconducting bulk materials
基于涡旋动力学的量子理论，研究了第二类常规和高温超导块材的临界电流密度Jc。结果表明，在恒定磁场下，当T<T_dp时，临界电流密度J_c随温度的升高而减小当T_dp< T <T_f（边界涨落温度）时，Jc呈幂律衰减，当T>T_f时，Jc呈指数衰减;而对于恒定温度，Jc先减小，然后在达到最大值后增大，最后随着磁场的增加再次减小。这些结果与实验结果一致。
Giant vortices with higher phase-winding than $2π$ are usually energetically unfavorable, but geometric symmetry constraints on a superconductor in a magnetic field are known to stabilize such objects. Here, we show via microscopic calculations that giant vortices can appear in intrinsically non-superconducting materials, even without any applied magnetic field. The enabling mechanism is the proximity effect to a host superconductor where a current flows, and we also demonstrate that antivortices can appear in this setup. Our results open the possibility to study electrically controllable topo…
We investigated the material parameters of several single-layer cuprates, including those with fluorinated buffer layers, with the aim of identifying possible high-temperature superconductors. To evaluate the material parameters, we use the Wannierization techniques and the constrained random phase approximation. The obtained single-band Hubbard models are studied using the fluctuation-exchange approximation. Comparison among several cuprates reveals unknown high-$T_{\text{c}}$ superconductors. In, Ga, Al, and Cd compounds in particular show the potential to exhibit higher-$T_{\text{c}}$ super…
Vortex dynamics is strongly connected with the mechanisms responsible for the photon detection of superconducting devices. Indeed, the local suppression of superconductivity by photon absorption may trigger vortex nucleation and motion effects, which can make the superconducting state unstable. In addition, scaling down the thickness of the superconducting films and/or the width of the bridge geometry can strongly influence the transport properties of superconducting films, e.g. affecting its critical current as well as its switching current into the normal state. Understanding such instabilit…
The family of multi-layered superconductors derived from the doped topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$ has been found to be unusually robust against non-magnetic disorder. Recent experimental studies have highlighted the fact that the location of impurities could play a critical role for this puzzling robustness. Here we investigate the effects of four different types of impurities, on-site, interstitial, intercalated and polar, on the superconducting critical temperature. We find that different components of the scattering potential are active depending on the impurity configuration and choice…
Chiral Majorana hinge modes are characteristic of a second-order topological superconductor in three dimensions. Here we systematically study pairing symmetry in the point group D_{2h}, and find that the leading pairing channels can be of s-, d-, and s+id-wave pairing in Dirac materials. Except for the odd-parity s-wave pairing superconductivity, the s+id-wave pairing superconductor is topologically nontrivial and possesses Majorana hinge and surface modes. The chiral Majorana hinge modes can be characterized by a winding number of the quadrupole moment, or quantized quadruple moment at the sy…
In this paper, we present results on magnetization properties of boron nitride-carbon (BN-C) and boron carbide-carbon (B4C-C) granular mixtures. The temperature-dependent magnetization for field-cooled during cooling and field-cooled during warming shows a kind of thermal hysteresis that is always seen around a metamagnetic phase transition from an antiferromagnetic martensite to a ferromagnetic austenite phase. The low-temperature magnetization has an upward turn that can be attributed to superparamagnetism, diamagnetic shielding, and trapped flux characteristic to high-temperature supercondu…
Minimum model and its theoretical analysis for superconducting materials with BiS$_2$ layers
我们对新发现的超导体LaO $_{1-x}$ F $_x$ BiS $_2$进行了第一性原理能带计算，研究了其晶格结构和价带导带隙与氟掺杂的关系.我们发现，La和S之间的距离以及氟掺杂显着影响的带隙。另一方面，BiS $_2$层的四轨道模型表明晶格结构不影响这部分能带。尽管如此，在轻电子掺杂的情况下，带隙可以影响载流子浓度，这反过来又会影响传输特性。
DFT simulation based ab-initio approach has been executed for investigating the comparative study of the physical properties of superconducting disilicide materials YT$_2$Si$_2$ (T= Co, Ni, Ru, Rh, Pd, Ir). This is the first comparative theoretical investigation of these materials, which is done through Cambridge Serial Total Energy Package module.
The application of superconducting materials is becoming more and more widespread. Traditionally, the discovery of new superconducting materials relies on the experience of experts and a large number of "trial and error" experiments, which not only increases the cost of experiments but also prolongs the period of discovering new superconducting materials. In recent years, machine learning has been increasingly applied to materials science. Based on this, this manuscript proposes the use of XGBoost model to identify superconductors; the first application of deep forest model to predict the crit…
Recently it has been demonstrated that the pair-exchange coupling of quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) bands with conventional higher-dimensional bands in one multiband superconducting material can result in the formation of robust aggregate pair condensate. In particular, it has been found that the Q1D thermal pair fluctuations are suppressed in the presence of deep conventional band(s), where the Fermi level is much larger than the characteristic cut-off energy. Here we report that impact of the Q1D fluctuations is significantly weakened even in the presence of nearly shallow higher-dimensional ba…
The nonsymmorphic Zr$_{2}$Ir alloy is a possible topological semimetal candidate material and as such may be part of an exotic class of superconductors. Zr$_{2}$Ir is a superconductor with a transition temperature of 7.4 K with critical fields of 19.6(3) mT and 3.79(3) T, as determined by heat capacity and magnetisation. Zero field muon spin relaxation measurements show that time-reversal symmetry is preserved in these materials. The specific heat and transverse field muon spin rotation measurements rule out any possibility to have a nodal or anisotropic superconducting gap, revealing a conven…
High-temperature conventional superconductivity in hydrogen-rich materials under high pressure has been reportedly found in twelve different compounds in recent years. However, the experimental evidence on which these claims are based has recently been called into question. Here we discuss the measurement of trapped magnetic flux, that should establish definitively that these materials are indeed high-temperature superconductors. Its absence should confirm claims to the contrary.
