T. Shiroka

At ambient pressure, the LBCO-0.125 crystal barely conducts electricity without loss. Inside, electrons arrange into stripes with alternating magnetization, and these stripes act as barriers: superconducting pairs form but cannot flow freely through the whole sample.

Inside a superconductor, a magnetic field typically twists into tubes, vortices, each carrying one quantum of magnetic flux. That's how the classic Abrikosov lattice works. But in LiFeAs crystals, the picture is different. Muon spectroscopy showed that the field penetrates not as individual vortices but as stripes. Each stripe contains pairs of 'coreless' vortices.