A newly discovered material allows electricity to flow with zero resistance in one direction while acting as a barrier in the other.
Superconductors usually carry current perfectly in any direction, making it difficult to build logic gates or diodes. This discovery uses nonreciprocal magnetism to create a one-way street for supercurrents. The interaction between antiferromagnetic order and electricity enables a perfect superconducting diode effect. This breakthrough could lead to a new generation of ultra-fast electronics that do not generate any heat. Computing could move past the physical limits of traditional silicon by using these magnetic supercurrents for logic.
Superconducting diode effect in correlated electron systems by nonreciprocal magnetism
arXiv · 2605.00601
The superconducting diode effect (SDE), characterized by a nonreciprocal critical current in superconductors, has recently been observed in strongly correlated electron systems and near quantum criticality, pointing to unconventional mechanisms beyond weak-coupling theories. Here we investigate the SDE in the Rashba-Zeeman-Hubbard model, which captures $d$-wave superconductivity in an antiferromagnetic quantum critical regime, using the Dyson-Gor'kov equation with the fluctuation exchange approx