Prof. Dr. Mikhail Feigelman (Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics, Moscow): Strongly disordered superconductors and superconductor-insulator transition

I will first review basic ideas concerning competition between superconductivity and disorder and discuss several known types of quantum phase transitions leading to breakdown of superconductivity. Then I will describe relatively recent advances in the field, both new experimental results and the related theoretical achievements. To put the subject to a broader context, I will discuss the ways disordered superconductors can be used to construct an artificial quantum media with effective "fine structure constant" of the order of unity and why it is useful for building protected superconducting quantum circuits. Finally, I will describe briefly the most recent discovery in the field: contrary to a common wisdom, quantum breakdown of superconductivity by disorder in indium oxide was found to be a sharp first-order transition.

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