Unconventional superconductivity using renormalisation group methods

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The key research questions in this project are:

• To identify unconventional superconductor candidate materials.
• To further develop functional renormalisation group methods used to search for these candidate materials.

The details

Unconventional superconductors are a class of superconductors which are the most promising for the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. Room-temperature superconductors conduct electricity with no heat loss, and their incorporation in electronics would reduce worldwide power consumption drastically.

In this project, we apply cutting-edge theoretical methods to identify candidate materials that could be unconventional superconductors.

Graduate researcher profile: Matthew Bunney

What did you do before you started your PhD?

I studied a Master of Science in Physics at the University of Melbourne.

What are the challenges of your research role?

There’s a lot of knowledge out there in the form of different papers and theories, synthesizing these to understand what is already known and developing a path forward in the research is quite challenging.

What is the best part of your research role?

Learning so much about quantum physics and seeing how micro-scale quantum theory can be applied to understand the macro-scale behaviour of a material.

Where do you wish to go after your PhD? Do you want to enter industry or continue doing more research?

The current goal is more research – but being so early in a PhD, we’ll have to wait and see.

Supervision team

• The University of Melbourne: Associate Professor Stephan Rachel
• RWTH Aachen: Professor Carsten Honerkamp