Speaker
Description
Superconductivity emerges due to pairing of electrons in Cooper pairs, which are bosonic quasi-particles with integer spin and which condense into a macroscopically coherent ground state. So far, in all cases where the pairing symmetry of the Cooper pairs has been established, they form a spin singlet state, but they could in principle also exist as spin one quasi-particles and form a spin-triplet condensate.
The currently leading candidate materials are the uranium superconductors, however identifying their pairing symmetry has remained challenging. I will show a detailed study of the candidate triplet superconductor UPt₃ by scanning tunneling spectroscopy, and how from a combination of tunneling spectroscopy and theoretical modelling we can draw conclusions about the superconducting order parameter.