The decades-long effort to create practical superconductors moved a step forward with the discovery at Rice Univ. that two distinctly different iron-based compounds share common mechanisms for moving electrons.
Samples from two classes of iron-based superconductors, pnictides and chalcogenides, employ similar coupling between electrons in their superconducting state, said Rice physicist Qimiao Si. Understanding that mechanism may help researchers find even better superconductors, he said.
The findings appear online in a Nature Communications paper by Si and colleagues in China and at Florida State Univ., George Mason Univ. and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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