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Colloquium
Speaker
S. Ramakrishnan (TIFR, Mumbai)
Date & Time
Mon, 22 August 2016, 15:00 to 16:00
Venue
Emmy Noether Seminar Room, ICTS, Bangalore
Resources
Abstract

Bismuth(Bi) has played a very important role in uncovering many interesting physical properties in condensed matter research 1 and continues to draw enormous scientific interests due to its anomalous electronic properties. Unlike metals where there is roughly one mobile electron per atom, in a semi-metal like Bi, the concentration of mobile electrons is extremely low (100,000 atoms share a single mobile electron). Hence, the superconductivity (SC) in bulk Bi is thought to be very unlikely at a currently achievable temperature (~40 µK). In this talk, I will describe the first-ever observation of bulk SC in Bi single crystals (99.9999%) below 530 µK under ambient pressure with an estimated critical magnetic field of 5.2 µT (one fifth of earth’s magnetic field) at absolute zero 2 . The standard models (superconductivity) cannot explain this phenomenon because the characteristic thermal energy is comparable to the Fermi energy in Bi and a new theory is necessary.