Colloquium

Title:  Unconventional Superconductivity - A matter of Symmetry and Topology

Speaker: Manfred Sigrist, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Location: Room 111, Physics Building

Time: 15:00-16:00, Fri, Dec 4, 2015

Abstract:
Unconventional superconducting phases incorporate most intriguing features through the symmetry and topological properties of their order parameters, as already several decades ago has been found in the superfluid He-3. Among the known unconventional superconductors only few are considered as good candidates to realize topological phases. The most prominent cases are the so-called chiral superconductors, such as Sr2RuO4 most likely with chiral p-wave and SrPtAs possibly with chiral d-wave pairing. Cooper pairs form here with finite angular momentum. We will discuss the basic phenomenology of the two systems and give an overview of the status of experiments attempting to probe their topological properties. Finally other cases of topological superconductivity will be briefly discussed.

Biography:
MANFRED SIGRIST was born in Switzerland. He received his diploma of physics in 1986 and his PhD in 1989 at ETH Zurich. His first postdoc  led him to Tsukuba University in Japan, followed by a postdoc position at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. From 1993 he visited for two years MIT, Cambridge, and then became a research fellow at ETH Zurich. In 1997 he was appointed as a professor of the Yukawa Institute at the Kyoto University and eventually moved back to ETH Zurich in 2001 where he is a professor for theoretical condensed matter since. His research interests lie in strongly correlated electron systems, unconventional superconductivity, artificially structured materials and graphene. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. He authored several review articles in Review of Modern Physics and Physics Today.