High Temperature Superconductivity:Taming Serendipity

At we pass the centenary of the discovery of superconductivity, the design of new and more useful superconductors remains as enigmatic as ever. As high-density current carriers with little or no power loss, high-temperature superconductors (HTS) offer unique solutions to fundamental grid challenges of the 21st century and hold great promise in addressing our global energy challenge in energy production, storage, and distribution. Traditionally guided by serendipity, our recent materials genome initiative is geared to develop predictive design of HTS. In this pursuit, we have chosen point contact spectroscopy (PCS) to aid in identifying promising candidates; as we have proved PCS to be an identifier of non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior above Tc, ubiquitous to all unconventional superconductors. We present a new definition of unconventional superconductivity; that the electronic fluid in the normal state is NFL, and that not necessarily the superconducting order parameter breaks the symmetry of the underlying lattice. We present how these studies will help to categorize and identify promising new HTS candidates.