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Exotic new superconductors delight and confound
Three new species of superconductivity were spotted this year, illustrating the myriad ways electrons can join together to form a frictionless quantum soup.
Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak, an academic power couple who run a lab at Cornell University, had been searching for superconductivity in TMDs since Jarillo-Herrero’s blockbuster twisted-graphene discovery in 2018. They spent years mixing and matching five kinds of TMD crystals, trying out different twist angles and temperatures, and applying various electric-field strengths to the material — searching a massive haystack for a superconducting device. Last year, Ju’s group made a splash when they placed a five-layer graphene flake on an insulator at a twisted angle and observed a rare electron behavior that normally requires a strong magnetic field to induce.
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