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QUANTUM MATERIALS

A magnetic field boost for superconductors

High-magnetic-field experiments on the recently discovered unconventional superconductor UTe2 are consistent with p-wave pairing arising while time-reversal symmetry is broken. In turn, this suggests that this material is a candidate for a chiral superconductor that may be exploited for topological quantum computing.

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Fig. 1: The unusual magnetic field versus angle phase diagram for orthorhombic UTe2 that shows three superconducting phases surviving fields exceeding 65 T reported by Ran and colleagues.
Fig. 2: Topological quantum computing relies on the fact that in two dimensions the exchange of two indistinguishable particles may trigger a change of state for the underlying quantum system.

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Correspondence to Marc Janoschek.

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Janoschek, M. A magnetic field boost for superconductors. Nat. Phys. 15, 1211–1212 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0731-1

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