The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. The phonon-mediated attractive interaction between carriers leads to the Cooper pair formation in conventional superconductors. Despite decades of research, the glue holding Cooper pairs in high-temperature superconducting cuprates is still controversial, and the same is true f...

It is now well established that vortex dynamics in samples with a spatially asymmetric pinning potential can lead to rectifying vortex ‘diode’ behaviour. Spatial asymmetry is not a fundamental requirement for the control of vortex motion, however, and we demonstrate that vortex ‘lensing’ is possible in highly anisotropic layered superconductors simply under the action of non time-reversible tra...