(PhysOrg.com) -- In this 100th anniversary year of the discovery
of superconductivity, physicists at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst and Swedens Royal Institute of Technology
have published a fully self-consistent theory of the new kind of
superconducting behavior, Type 1.5, this month in the journal
Physical Review B. In three recent papers, the authors report on
their detailed investigations to show that a Type 1.5
superconducting state is indeed possible in a class of materials
called multiband superconductors. For years, most physicists
believed that superconductors must be either Type I or Type II.
Type 1.5 superconductivity is the subject of intense debate
because until now there was no theory to connect the physics
with micro-scale properties of real materials, say Egor Babaev
of UMass Amherst, currently a fellow at the technology institute
in Stockholm, with Mikhail Silaev, a postdoctoral researcher
there. Their new papers now provide a theoretical framework to
allow scientists to calculate co