Understanding the field-polarized state that hosts incredibly high-field superconductivity in uranium ditelluride

Uranium ditelluride (UTe₂) was recently discovered to be a superconductor with a transition temperature of approximately 2 K. Its superconducting state is quite exotic and all evidence to date suggests that it is a spin-triplet superconductor, one of only a few ever discovered. This makes UTe₂ interesting both on the basis of fundamental physics and for its potential use in topological qubits that would enable fault-tolerant quantum computing.



Under an applied magnetic field, UTe₂ exhibits a number of other unusual behaviors, including a superconducting state that only appears under incredibly high fields of 40 T or greater, and only with field applied in specific directions relative to the crystallographic axes. This superconducting state emerges from a field-polarized magnetic state which we are still in the process of characterizing. I will share recent work in which we explore the transition into that field-polarized state and what it can tell us about the magnetic state itself, as well as the incredibly high-field superconducting state that it hosts.