We’ve been told all of our lives to avoid stress – but in physics, stress might just be the key to unlocking the secret of superconductivity. In an attempt to establish superconductivity, Moll discovered that the critical temperature was changing depending on the placement of the wire contacts. This collides directly with the conventional belief of superconductivity, which is that the entire material must be either completely, uniformly superconductive, or not. “Actually in the literature, it was known that the superconducting transition temperature of the material must depend on strain,” Nowack said. “We’re [also] thinking we can apply this to interesting magnetic systems that have interesting magnetic order, and change the properties of the magnetic order using strain,” Nowack said.

Source: Daily Sun January 28, 2020 03:22 UTC