New Superconductive Materials Just Discovered

The original version about This article appeared inside What a magazinee.

In 2024, superconductivity—the flow of electricity without mixing with zero—was discovered in three different materials. Two events enhance the book’s understanding of the events. The third is completely torn. “It’s a very unusual type of superconductivity that most people would have thought was impossible,” he said Ashwin Vishwanatha physicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the discovery.

Since 1911, when the Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes observed that the resistance of electricity disappears, high energy has attracted the attention of physicists. There’s a real secret to how it happens: This phenomenon requires electrons, which carry electricity, to interact. Electrons repel each other, so how can they combine?

Then there’s the promise of technology: Already, high energy has helped create MRI machines with high-energy collisions. If physicists can better understand how it happens and when it starts, maybe they can create a wire that conducts electricity all the time instead of overheating, as is the case now. World-changing technologies—permanent electric grids, electric cars and magnetism—could follow.

Recent discoveries have added to the secret of high performance and increased optimism. “It seems that, in matter, superconductivity is everywhere,” he said Matthew Yankowitzan astrophysicist at the University of Washington.

The discovery is based on a recent breakthrough in materials science: Three new phenomena of superconductivity are emerging in materials assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These instruments show unparalleled versatility; at the touch of a button, scientists can change it between active, hidden, and strange behavior – a modern form of alchemy that has greatly increased the search for the highest quality.

Now it seems more likely that various reasons can cause this problem. Just as birds, bees and flies use different wings to fly, materials seem to combine electrons in different ways. Although researchers are debating exactly what is happening in the various two-dimensional properties in question, they hope that a larger zoo of superconductors will help them understand the universe of the phenomenon.

Electron Pairing

The story of the Kamerlingh Onnes phenomenon (and superconductivity seen in some very cold metals) was finally broken in 1957. John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer I thought that at low temperature, the jittery atomic lattice becomes calm down, so that very delicate results through. Electrons slowly pull protons into the lattice, pulling them inward to create more positive charges. This transition, known as a phonon, can capture a second electron, creating a “Cooper pair.” A Cooper couple can come together to form a cohesive team where decisions alone cannot be made. The resulting quantum entanglement interferes seamlessly between the atoms of the material, which often prevents the flow of electricity.

Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer’s idea of ​​phonon-based superconductivity won them the Nobel Prize in physics in 1972. But it wasn’t the whole story. In the 1980s, physicists discovered that copper-filled crystals called cuprates can control high temperatures, where atomic jiggles wash out phonons. Other similar examples followed.