Research

Ever since the Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes discovered the phenomena of superconductivity in 1911 by cooling down liquid helium, finding a room-temperature superconductor has been a holy grail of physics. When a material is in its superconducting phase, the electrical resistance of the material goes to zero. Coupled with other exotic thermal and magnetic properties, the applications of finding a room-temperature superconductor are endless. Bardeen-Cooper-Schieffer(BCS) came up with the first microscopic theory to explain s-wave superconductivity in the 1950s, and since then there has been a great interest in characterising superconductivity theoretically across systems.

In a parallel story, topological materials have experienced an emergence since the late 1980s. Topological materials are a collection of gapped and un-gapped materials where the property that dominates the interactions is the quantum topology. This makes the material incredibly immune to disorder. One such crystal is a Weyl semimetal. It is a gapless phase of matter which has band touchings at finite points in the bulk and at the surface, there are surface states called Fermi arcs.

Recent experiments have shown superconductivity on the surface of a Weyl semimetal. At University of Houston with the guidance of Dr. Pavan Hosur, I’m currently working on theoretically characterising that surface superconductivity