{"id":244948,"date":"2026-10-06T01:40:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/cooper-pairs-found-above-superconducting-critical-temperature-in-pair-density-waves"},"modified":"2026-10-06T01:40:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:40:23","slug":"cooper-pairs-found-above-superconducting-critical-temperature-in-pair-density-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/cooper-pairs-found-above-superconducting-critical-temperature-in-pair-density-waves","title":{"rendered":"Cooper pairs found above superconducting critical temperature in pair density waves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cooper-pairs-found-above-superconducting-critical-temperature-in-pair-density-waves.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Physicists with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign\u2019s Grainger College of Engineering have identified a new form of superconducting behavior. Experiments on the metal uranium ditelluride reveal that Cooper pairs, the composite electron units responsible for superconductivity, can organize into nonuniform patterns that exist even when the main superconducting phase is absent.<\/p>\n<p>These patterns, known as pair density waves (PDWs), were first predicted 20 years ago and have been found to coincide with superconductivity in other metals. But new research <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2602117123\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i> not only shows that PDWs exist in uranium ditelluride but also provides the first direct evidence that they can persist in the \u201cordinary\u201d phase once superconductivity vanishes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPair density waves are the Cheshire Cat\u2019s grin of superconductivity,\u201d said Eduardo Fradkin, an Illinois Grainger Engineering physics professor and a project co-lead. \u201cThey are the vestige that remains once the phase itself has disappeared. In conventional superconductors, Cooper pairs form when the full phase transition occurs, but in this system, their observation in PDWs above the transition point shows that they are formed beforehand in a different state.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign\u2019s Grainger College of Engineering have identified a new form of superconducting behavior. Experiments on the metal uranium ditelluride reveal that Cooper pairs, the composite electron units responsible for superconductivity, can organize into nonuniform patterns that exist even when the main superconducting phase is absent. These patterns, known as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}