Transporting energy is costly. When a current runs through conductive materials, some of the energy is lost due to resistance as particles within the material interact—just notice the warmth from your phone or laptop. This energy loss presents a hurdle to the advancement of many technologies and scientists are searching for ways to make superconductors that eliminate resistance.
Superconductors can also provide a platform for fault-tolerant quantum computing if endowed with topological properties. An example of the latter is the quantum Hall effect where the topology of electrons leads to universal, "quantized," resistance with accuracy up to one part in a billion, which finds uses in meteorology. Unfortunately, the quantum Hall effect requires extremely strong magnetic fields, typically detrimental to superconductivity. This makes the search for topological superconductors a challenging task.
In two new papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B UConn Physicist Pavel Volkov and his colleagues propose how to experimentally manipulate the quantum particles, called quasiparticles, in very thin layers of ordinary superconductors to create topological superconductors by slightly twisting the stacked layers.
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