Strong Increase of T c of Sr 2 RuO 4 Under Both Tensile and Compressive Strain

Strained Superconductor Distorting a material and observing its response can allow insight into its electronic properties. Thin films can be strained by placing them on a substrate with a different lattice constant; bulk samples present more of a challenge. Hicks et al. (p. 283 ) designed an apparatus to apply both tensile and compressive strain and used it to study the properties of the superconductor Sr 2 RuO 4 , which has long been hypothesized to host the unusual p-wave superconductivity. The response of the superconducting transition temperature T c to the applied strain depended on the direction in which the strain was applied, and did not exhibit a cusp predicted to occur around zero strain. As the technique leaves a surface of the probe open to external probes, it could be adopted for a wide range of methods.