Muon investigations of a rare spin-triplet superconductor

Synopsis

Although extremely rare in a solid-state material, spin-triplet superconductivity is of significant fundamental and practical interest. Spin-triplet superconductors naturally possess the crucial element required for realizing superconducting spintronics. Moreover, spin-triplet superconductors of odd parity are intrinsically topological and as such support Majorana fermions. Encoding of topologically protected quantum information in Majorana-based qubits is considered a promising platform for achieving a quantum computer robust to environmental noise. I will discuss how a compound discovered in 1994 and considered to be a spin-triplet superconductor with great potential for superconducting spintronics and quantum technologies has only recently been found out to be something different. The rest of my talk will describe a recently discovered uranium-based spin-triplet superconductor and how an experimental technique using spin-polarized muons at TRIUMF is advancing our understanding of this novel superconductor.