New group article in Nat. Commun.!
Our research group has led an international collaboration and have addressed a long-standing question about the possible existence of magnetism in the unconventional superconductor Sr2RuO4. The results are presented in an article published in the journal Nature Communications. Discovery importance highlighted by several magazines and scientific media!
Since the discovery of superconductivity in Sr2RuO4 in 1994, extensive research on the compound that has suggested that Sr2RuO4 is a special system with unique properties. These properties make Sr2RuO4 a candidate material with great potential for superconducting spintronics and quantum electronics applications.
The goal of this study was to understand why the superconducting state of Sr2RuO4 exhibits features that are typically found in ferromagnets, which are normally considered to be antagonists to superconductors. Our team has found that Sr2RuO4 hosts a new form of magnetism that can coexist with superconductivity and exists independently of superconductivity as well.
We have found that this new magnetic phase is generated by orbital loop currents on the reconstructed Sr2RuO4 surface. Apart from setting a reference for the discovery of the same phase in other materials, our discovery represents another essential tile to solve the puzzle on the nature of superconductivity in Sr2RuO4. The results are reported in an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
The importance of this discovery has been highlighted by several newspapers and websites including ScienceDaily, Phys.org, Azoquantum