Condensed Matter

We study Superconductor/Ferromagnet/Superconductor junctions with CuNi, PtNi, or Ni interlayers. Remarkably, we observe that supercurrents through Ni can be significantly larger than through diluted alloys. The phenomenon is attributed to the dirtiness of disordered alloys leading to a short coherence length despite a small exchange energy. To the contrary, pure Ni is clean resulting in a coherence length as long as in a normal metal. Analysis of temperature dependencies of critical currents reveals a crossover from short (dirty) to long (clean) range proximity effects in Pt1-xNix with increasing Ni concentration. Our results point out that structural properties of a ferromagnet play a crucial role for the proximity effect and indicate that conventional strong-but-clean ferromagnets can be advantageously used in superconducting spintronic devices.

We report on the structural phase transitions in the S doped FeSe superconductor by powder synchrotron X ray diffraction at high pressures up to 18.5 GPa under compression and decompression modes. In order to create high quasi hydrostatic pressures, diamond anvil cells filled with helium as a pressure transmitting medium were used. It was found that at ambient pressure and room temperature, S doped FeSe has a tetragonal structure. Under compression, in the region of 10 GPa, a phase transition from the tetragonal into the orthorhombic structure is observed, which persists up to 18.5 GPa. Our results strongly suggest that, at decompression, as the applied pressure decreases to 6 GPa and then is completely removed, most of the sample recrystallizes into the hexagonal phase of the structural type NiAs. However, the other part of the sample remains in the high pressure orthorhombic phase, while the tetragonal phase is not restored. These observations illustrate a strong hysteresis of the structural properties of S doped FeSe during a phase transition under pressure.

We report the synthesis of a new quasi one-dimensional (1D) iron selenide. Ba9Fe3Se15 was synthesized at high temperature and high pressure of 5.5 GPa and systematically studied via structural, magnetic and transport measurements at ambient and at high-pressures. Ba9Fe3Se15 crystallizes in a monoclinic structure and consists of face-sharing FeSe6 octahedral chains along the c axis. At ambient pressure it exhibits an insulating behavior with a band gap ~460 meV and undergoes a ferrimagnet-like phase transition at 14 K. Under high pressure, a complete metallization occurs at ~29 GPa, which is accompanied by a spin state crossover from high spin (HS) state to low spin (LS) state. The LS appears for pressures P >36 GPa.

We theoretically investigate the crystalline anisotropy of topological phase transitions in phase-controlled planar Josephson junctions (JJs) subject to spin-orbit coupling and in-plane magnetic fields. It is shown how topological superconductivity (TS) is affected by the interplay between the magnetic field and the orientation of the junction with respect to its crystallographic axes. This interplay can be used to electrically tune between different symmetry classes in a controlled fashion and thereby optimize the stability and localization of Majorana bound states in planar Josephson junctions. Our findings can be used as a guide for achieving the most favorable conditions when engineering TS in planar JJs and can be particularly relevant for setups containing non-collinear junctions which have been proposed for performing braiding operations on multiple Majorana pairs.

Understanding the electron pairing in hole-doped cuprate superconductors has been a challenge, in particular because the "normal" state from which it evolves is unprecedented. Now, after three and a half decades of research, involving a wide range of experimental characterizations, it is possible to delineate a clear and consistent cuprate story. It starts with doping holes into a charge-transfer insulator, resulting in in-gap states. These states exhibit a pseudogap resulting from the competition between antiferromagnetic superexchange J between nearest-neighbor Cu atoms (a real-space interaction) and the kinetic energy of the doped holes, which, in the absence of interactions, would lead to extended Bloch-wave states whose occupancy is characterized in reciprocal space. To develop some degree of coherence on cooling, the spin and charge correlations must self-organize in a cooperative fashion. A specific example of resulting emergent order is that of spin and charge stripes, as observed in La 2?�x Ba x CuO 4 . While stripe order frustrates bulk superconductivity, it nevertheless develops pairing and superconducting order of an unusual character. The antiphase order of the spin stripes decouples them from the charge stripes, which can be viewed as hole-doped, two-leg, spin- 1 2 ladders. To achieve superconducting order, the pair correlations in neighboring ladders must develop phase order. In the presence of spin stripe order, antiphase Josephson coupling can lead to pair-density-wave superconductivity. Alternatively, in-phase superconductivity requires that the spin stripes have an energy gap, which empirically limits the coherent superconducting gap. Hence, superconducting order in the cuprates involves a compromise between the pairing scale, which is maximized at x??1 8 , and phase coherence, which is optimized at x??.2 .

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are a new class of materials which are being energetically studied around the world. HEAs are characterized by a multi-component alloy in which five or more elements randomly occupy a crystallographic site. The conventional HEA concept has developed into simple crystal structures such as face-centered-cubic (fcc), body-centered-cubic (bcc) and hexagonal-closed packing (hcp) structures. The highly atomic-disordered state produces many superior mechanical or thermal properties. Superconductivity has been one of the topics of focus in the field of HEAs since the discovery of the bcc HEA superconductor in 2014. A characteristic of superconductivity is robustness against atomic disorder or extremely high pressure. The materials research on HEA superconductors has just begun, and there are open possibilities for unexpectedly finding new phenomena. The present review updates the research status of HEA superconductors. We survey bcc and hcp HEA superconductors and discuss the simple material design. The concept of HEA is extended to materials possessing multiple crystallographic sites; thus, we also introduce multi-site HEA superconductors with the CsCl-type, {\alpha}-Mn-type, A15, NaCl-type, {\sigma}-phase and layered structures and discuss the materials research on multi-site HEA superconductors. Finally, we present the new perspectives of eutectic HEA superconductors and gum metal HEA superconductors.

We introduce below the concept of defecton, and describe briefly the electron polaron effect, the clustering of defectons, and also the defecton mechanism of superconductivity. It is shown that in the case of high-temperature superconducting metal hydrides, which acquire superconducting properties under pressure of hundreds of gigapascals, this mechanism can make a significant contribution to the Cooper pairing.

Based on a weak coupling calculation, we show that an accidental degeneracy appears between even- and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-1D limit of the repulsive Hubbard model on the square lattice. We propose that this effect could be at play on the quasi-1D orbitals Ru d zx and d zy of Sr2RuO4, leading to a gap of the form Δ even +i Δ odd which could help reconcile several experimental results.

We study the density of states (DOS) inside superconducting Josephson SIsFS junctions with complex interlayer consisting of a thin superconducting spacer 's' between insulator I and a ferromagnetic metal F. The consideration is focused on the local density of states in the vicinity of a tunnel barrier, and it permits to estimate the current-voltage characteristics in the resistive state of such junctions. We study the influence of the proximity effect and Zeeman splitting on the properties of the system, and we find significant sub-gap regions with non-vanishing DOS. We also find manifestations of the 0- π transition in the behavior of DOS in a thin s-layer. These properties lead to appearance of new characteristic features on I-V curves which provide additional information about electronic states inside the junction.

Inspired by a recently proposed superconducting mechanism for a new cuprate superconductor Ba 2 CuO 3+δ , we theoretically design an unconventional nickelate superconductor with d 8 electron configuration. Our strategy is to enlarge the on-site energy difference between 3 d x 2 − y 2 and other 3d orbitals by adopting halogens or hydrogen as out-of-plane anions, so that the 3d bands other than d x − y 2 lie just below the Fermi level for the d 8 configuration, acting as incipient bands that enhance superconductivity. We also discuss a possible relevance of the present proposal to the recently discovered superconductor (Nd,Sr)NiO 2 .