RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT up to 75 tesla, which is about 1.5 million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. Then, a team led by Alessandra Lanzara used spectroscopic techniques at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source to image the CeCoIn5 crystals' electronic energy structure and superconductivity as a function of chemical composition. Lanzara is a senior faculty scientist and co-investigator in the Quantum Materials program in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley physics professor. Much to their surprise, the researchers found that in chemical compositions where the superconductivity is strongest, the number of free electrons jumps from a small value to a large value, signifying that the material is at a transition point. (A free electron is an electron that is not permanently bound to an atom.) The researchers attributed this transition to the behavior of electrons associated with the cerium atoms. The High-Resolution Spectroscopy of Complex Materials (MERLIN) beamline - aka Beamline 4.0.3 - at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) where the Berkeley Lab-led team conducted the photoemission spectroscopy experiments to measure the electronic energy structure and superconductivity of doped CeCoIn5 samples. (Credit: Image courtesy of former Berkeley Lab researcher Daniel Eilbott) They tuned some of the CeCoIn5 crystals to the magnetic state by replacing a few indium atoms with cadmium, and tuned other samples to the superconducting state by replacing indium with tin. Maksimovic measured the electron density of these materials at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory's Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory using magnetic fields of " There are only a few materials where such a transition is suspected to occur. We have some of the clearest evidence that it actually does, and that's pretty exciting, " Maksimovic said. In future studies, the researchers plan to investigate how the transition in CeCoIn5 applies to other unconventional superconductors like cuprates. They also plan to investigate how the transition in CeCoIn5 may affect other physical properties of the material such as thermal conductivity. For more info see: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2022/03/24/exoticsuperconductors-superpowers/ WORLD CLASS ENGINEERED MAGNETIC SOLUTIONS PRODUCTION MAGNETIZING SYSTEMS STANDARD AND FULLY-CUSTOMIZED SYSTEMS BUILT WITH INDUSTRY-LEADING TECHNOLOGIES WWW.MAGINST.COM www.MagneticsMag.com July/August 2022 * Magnetics Business & Technology 21http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2022/03/24/exoticsuperconduductors-superpowers/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2022/03/24/exoticsuperconduductors-superpowers/ http://WWW.MAGINST.COM http://www.MagneticsMag.com