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NSF CAREER Award to Fund Study of Exotic Superconductors
Physics Assistant Professor Vlad Kozii aims to develop testable theories for unconventional, topological and low鈥慸ensity systems.
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Superconductors move electricity with no resistance, but many modern materials challenge the rules scientists once thought were unbreakable. As the search for new superconducting materials accelerates 鈥 spanning quantum technologies, energy applications and next鈥慻eneration electronics 鈥 the need for reliable, experimentally grounded theory has never been greater.
好色先生TV鈥檚 Vlad Kozii wants to know why certain materials are superconductors, and he鈥檚 digging down to the microscopic mechanisms that make these unconventional superconductors tick.
鈥淲e need to come up with some more sophisticated theories to describe these phenomena, so that's roughly what I'm working on,鈥 said Kozii, an assistant professor of physics.
Superconductivity is a special state where electricity can flow through a material with no resistance at all. Scientists have seen this happen in many materials, but a lot of them don鈥檛 behave the way the standard theory says they should. These unusual materials include ones with very few moving electrons, ones where electrons interact strongly, and ones with special 鈥渢opological鈥 structures.
鈥淓xperiments tell us that here is superconductivity, but not why. So how is that superconductivity possible? This is the type of question I鈥檓 trying to answer,鈥 Kozii said.
He said that no one knows exactly why these materials become superconductors. Many ideas exist, but they often don鈥檛 offer clear tests that scientists can use to prove what is really happening inside the material.
Kozii recently received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for the proposal 鈥淔rontiers of Superconductivity: Unconventional, Topological, and Low鈥慏ensity Systems.鈥
Kozii鈥檚 project aims to help solve this mystery. He is creating new models that make simple, testable predictions, and then comparing those results to real experiments. His work will help scientists understand the special properties of low鈥慸ensity, strongly interacting, and topological superconductors, and move closer to explaining how these strange materials work.
Understanding how these unusual superconductors work is important because it helps scientists learn which ideas about superconductivity are actually true. By making predictions that can be tested in real experiments, this project will show which microscopic mechanisms really cause certain materials to lose all electrical resistance.
This work also could help scientists explore new states of matter, including special kinds of superconductors that may appear when there are very few electrons or when the material has a unique structure. Discovering these states could lead to identifying new materials with surprising properties.
Learning more about these superconductors may also help solve old mysteries in other types of superconductors, including ones that work at higher temperatures. This deeper understanding could one day help scientists design better technologies that use electricity more efficiently. By aligning first鈥憄rinciples modeling with clear experimental signatures, Kozii鈥檚 project will help the community discriminate among competing mechanisms, pinpoint the physics at work in specific materials and guide future materials discovery.