Professor Maeno of Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan) and Assistant Professor Budakian of University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois，USA) were the leaders of both teams, and details of the research were published in the scientific Journal Science on the same day*.
Strontium ruthenium oxide (SRO) is an unconventional superconductor that has been proposed as the solid-state analog of the A-phase of superfluid helium 3 in which half-quantum vortex was predicted theoretically more than 30 years ago. In this research, magnetic measurements at 0.4 K were made, at University of Illinois, on a specimen fabricated by drilling a hole of 500 nm diameter on the 2 μm square Sr2RuO4 crystal grown at Kyoto University and placed on a micro-fabricated Si cantilever device developed at University of Illinois. The observed half-quantum magnetic flux, according to the news-releases from both universities, verifies that SRO is a spin-triplet superconductor and that application to topological quantum computing and spintronics is expected.
