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Unconventional superconductors


Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which does not conform to either the conventional BCS theory or Nikolay Bogolyubov's theory or its extensions.

The superconducting properties of CeCu2Si2, a type of heavy fermion material, were reported in 1979 by Frank Steglich. For a long time it was believed that CeCu2Si2 is a singlet d-wave superconductor but recently, it has become clear that this is not correct. In the early eighties, many more unconventional, heavy fermion superconductors were discovered, including UBe13, UPt3 and URu2Si2. In each of these materials, the anisotropic nature of the pairing is implicated by the power-law dependence of the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation rate and specific heat capacity on temperature. The presence of nodes in the superconducting gap of UPt3 was confirmed in 1986 from the polarization dependence of the ultrasound attenuation.

The first unconventional triplet superconductor, organic material (TMTSF)2PF6, was discovered by Denis Jerome and Klaus Bechgaard in 1979. Recent experimental works by Paul Chaikin's and Michael Naughton's groups as well as theoretical analysis of their data by Andrei Lebed have firmly confirmed unconventional nature of superconducting pairing in (TMTSF)2X (X=PF6, ClO4, etc.) organic materials.

April 1986 - The term "high-temperature superconductor" was first used to designate the new family of cuprate-perovskite ceramic materials discovered by Johannes Georg Bednorz and Karl Alexander Müller, for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year. Their discovery of the first high-temperature superconductor, LaBaCuO, with transition temperature of 35 K, generated great excitement.


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