Initially regarded as a scientific curiosity upon its discovery in 1911, superconductivity has provided numerous theoretical challenges and experimental surprises. From the development of Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1957 to the discovery of high-temperature superconducting cuprate ceramics in 1987, superconductivity continues to command attention for its scientific importance as well as its potential applications.
Gabriele La Nave, research professor of mathematics at Illinois, is a co-author of an article about a key connection uncovered between symmetry and Mott physics (the physics underlying high-temperature superconductors). These theoretical findings by principal investigator and Illinois physics professor Philip Phillips, La Nave, and Illinois physics postdoctoral researcher Edwin Huang were published March 21, 2022, in the journal Nature Physics and represent a big step toward understanding high-temperature superconductivity.