Superinsulators: the discovery of electric confinement in condensed matter systems

Superinsulators, a novel topological state of matter predicted by our collaboration and experi- mentally observed near the superconductor-insulator transition (SIT), are the electric-magnetic (S) duals of superconductors. In superinsulators, Cooper pairs are confined by electric fields compressed into strings via a monopole condensate (an instanton plasma in (2+1) dimensions), mirroring the dual Meissner effect and resembling quark confinement in hadrons. This realizes the electric counterpart of the dual superconductor mechanism proposed for confinement in QCD.