The study of superconductivity is littered with disappointments, dead ends and serendipitous findings, according to Antia Botana, professor of physics at Arizona State University.
“As theorists, we usually fail to predict new superconductors,” she said.
Yet in 2021, she experienced the high point of her early career. Together with experimenter Julia Mundy from Harvard University, she discovered a new superconducting material – a five-layer nickelate. They reported their findings in Nature Materials in September 2021.
“It was one of the best times of my life,” Botana recalls. “I was coming back from Spain and I received a message from my colleague Julia Mundy during my stopover. When I saw the resistivity drop to zero, there’s nothing better than that.
Botana was chosen as a 2022 Sloan Research Fellow. His research is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.
“Prof. Botana is one of the most influential theorists in the field of unconventional superconductivity, particularly in layered nickelates which have received considerable attention from the materials physics and condensed matter communities” “, said Serdar Ogut, program director in the Division of Materials Research at the National Science Foundation. “I expect his pioneering theoretical studies, in collaboration with leading experimentalists in the United States, to continue to push the boundaries, lead to the discovery of new superconducting materials and uncover fundamental mechanisms that could one day pave the way to room-temperature superconductivity.”
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