A wafer-thin layer of rust, formed naturally in air, helped researchers spot a behavior many physicists have chased for decades. That oxide, hematite (α-Fe2O3), appeared on the top layer of a stacked film device and “pinned” a magnetic layer in place. With that pinning, the team could flip the device between two magnetic states and watch what happened to superconductivity. What they saw was small in size but big in meaning: the transition temperature shifted the “wrong” way for an ordinary superconductor. Professor Jacob Linder at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), working at the QuSpin research centre, says the results point toward a long-sought state called triplet superconductivity. “We think we may have observed a triplet superconductor,” he said. The work, done with experimental collaborators in Italy, was published in Physical Review Letters and selected as an editor’s recommendation. “One of the major challenges in quantum technology is being able to perform data operations with sufficiently high accuracy,” says Jacob Linder. (CREDIT: Per Henning, NTNU) A superconductor that carries spin Superconductors carry …