A group led by Prof. Antony Carrington, and including Research Associate Dr. Joe Wilcox and PhD student Morgan Grant, investigate the structure of the superconducting energy gap in a range of unconventional superconductors.

As the energy gap is closely linked to the pairing interaction, probing the energy gap will give insight as to how electron pairing occurs in these compounds. The group combine very low temperatures (~60mK) with a radio-frequency technique to make high resolution measurements of the magnetic response of the superconducting phase.

Recently, the team also demonstrated how an additional weak, dc magnetic field can provide further information about the underlying gap structure, as well as showing, for the first time, unambiguous evidence for a long absent effect that is a prediction of the standard quasi-classical theory of superconductivity. [1][2]