Superinsulators: The Discovery of Electric Confinement in Condensed Matter Systems
摘要
Superinsulators are a new topological state of matter, predicted by our collaboration and experimentally observed in the critical vicinity of the superconductor-insulator transition (SIT). Superinsulators are dual to superconductors and realise electric-magnetic (S) duality. In superinsulators, Cooper pairs are linearly bound by electric fields squeezed into strings (dual Meissner effect) by a monopole condensate (instantons plasma in (2+1) dimensions), in analogy to quarks in hadrons. Superinsulators realise, thus, the electric version of the dual superconductor mechanism proposed to explain confinement in QCD.