The dance floor is full of couples waltzing. Usually, partners move in opposite directions: one steps forward, the other backward, to keep the overall rhythm. In superconductors, electrons also form pairs, and their motion resembles such a dance: spins (intrinsic magnetic moments) point in opposite directions, and orbital moments (characterizing rotation around the nucleus) cancel each other out.
If the floor is slightly tilted, dancers have to adjust. Some pairs start moving in unison. That's what happens when the crystal lattice of vanadium or niobium is stretched or compressed. The crystal's symmetry is lowered — instead of three mirror planes, only one remains. Electrons get the chance to pair with identical orbital moments. Calculations using density functional theory for superconductors showed that on the (111) surface, this effect is especially strong.
The most interesting part appears in a magnetic field. If the field is directed along the plane but breaks that last remaining mirror symmetry, a magnetization emerges in the superconductor, transverse to the applied field. This is like pushing a heavy cart forward and having it suddenly veer sideways — an unexpected and striking sign that something inside has rearranged. This transverse magnetic response is a direct consequence of pairing electrons with identical orbital moments, and it can be measured experimentally.
Deformed superconductors become a minimal platform for a new field — superconducting orbitronics. Instead of controlling only the electron spin (as in spintronics), here we use orbital degrees of freedom. This promises more energy-efficient memory and logic devices, where information is encoded not by charge but by the orbital state of Cooper pairs. So the electron dance, adjusting to the tilted floor, opens the way to future technologies.
Vanadium and niobium are neighboring elements in group 5 of the periodic table, and both become superconductors at temperatures around 5 and 9 kelvins, respectively. At such temperatures, even nitrogen would freeze into solid ice.
In Stanislaw Lem's novel 'Solaris', the ocean had the ability to control the orbits of particles, creating bizarre structures. Deformed superconductors are a step toward similar control over the quantum world.