DATE2026.11.06 #Press Releases

Two Lengths Characteristic of Superconductivity Can Now Be Calculated

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

— A Path to Predicting Superconductor Performance Without Relying on Experiments —

Summary

Associate Professor Mitsuaki Kawamura of the Graduate School of Engineering at Yokohama National University, Associate Professor Takuya Nomoto of the Graduate School of Science at Tokyo Metropolitan University, Dr. Niklas Witt of the University of Würzburg,and Professor Ryotaro Arita of the Graduate School of Science at The University of Tokyo (Team Director at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science) have developed a first-principles calculation method to determine the two fundamental lengths characterizing superconductors—“coherence length” and “magnetic penetration depth”—without using any experimental data.They confirmed that this method accurately reproduces experimental values for a wide range of superconductors, from elemental metals such as aluminum and niobium to hydrogen sulfide, which exhibits a high transition temperature of approximately 200 K (–73 °C) under high pressure.These results are expected to contribute to the design of superconducting wires and magnets, as well as the search for new superconductors.

This research was published in the international scientific journal Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society (APS), on November 3, 2026 (U.S. Eastern Time), and was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion, highlighting it as a noteworthy paper. The research was also featured in Physics (Physics Magazine), another APS publication, which published an accompanying explanatory article.

Figure 1. Conceptual illustration of the method developed in this study. (Top) A slowly varying spatial modulation characterized by momentum q is imposed on the Cooper pairs in the crystal. (Middle) The superconducting gap Δ_q and superconducting current J_q in the resulting state are calculated from first principles as functions of temperature T and momentum q. (Bottom) These results are used to determine the coherence length ξ₀, the characteristic length scale over which the superconducting order parameter Ψ recovers from its suppression at a normal–superconducting interface to its bulk value, and the London penetration depth λ_L, the characteristic depth to which an external magnetic field H penetrates the superconductor.

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Yokohama National University

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