Physicists at MIT have discovered a new switch for superconductivity that can help turn up unconventional superconducting materials. MIT Physicists say they successfully identified how iron selenide shifts to a superconductive state beginning at temperatures around minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists said earlier research suggested that individual atoms in other iron-based superconductors suddenly shifted in a different magnetic direction during the nematic transition. However, when MIT researchers used ultra-bright X-rays the iron selenide atoms, by contrast, changed their orbits collectively.
Riccardo Comin, the Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT and his co-authors Connor Occhialini, Shua Sanchez, and Qian Song, along with Gilberto Fabbris, Yongseong Choi, Jong-Woo Kim, and Philip Ryan at Argonne National Laboratory have published their results in a study appearing in Nature Materials. Read More