Superconductivity and incommensurate crystal structure modulations

Macroscopic symmetry properties of crystals are changed under the influence of incommensurate structure modulations. It reveals on symmetric properties of unconventional superconducting phases of crystals with incommensurate structures. In particular, the existence of superconducting cholesteric phases proves to be possible. The problem of the influence of incommensurate crystal structure modulations on the unconventional superconductivity is discussed by considering an application to heavy fermionic superconductor UPt3, which has modulations of atomic positions incommensurate with the parent HCP structure. ((orig.))