The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2024, superconductivity – the flow of electric current with zero resistance – was discovered in three different materials. Two instances of textbook understanding of the phenomenon. All three shreds are done. “This is an extraordinary form of superconductivity that many people would say is impossible,” said Ashvin Vishwanath, a physicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the discovery. Since 1911, when the Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first. seeing electrical resistance disappear, superconductivity has captivated physicists. There is a pure mystery about the phenomenon: The phenomenon requires electrons, which carry an electric current, to pair up. Electrons repel each other, so how can they unite? Then there is the promise of technology: Already, superconductivity has enabled the development of powerful MRI machines and particle colliders. If physicists can understand how and when the phenomenon appears, maybe they can engineer a cable that superconducts electricity in everyday conditions instead of only at low temperatures, as it is now. World-changing technologies—lossless power grids, magnetically capable flying vehicles—may be here. “It seems that, in materials, superconductivity is everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a physicist at the University of Washington. atomic sheet. These materials display unprecedented flexibility; at the touch of a button, physicists can switch between conducting, insulating, and other strange behavior-a modern form of alchemy that has supercharged the search for superconductivity. Now it seems more likely that various causes can cause the phenomenon. Just as birds, bees and dragonflies all fly using different wing structures, materials seem to bond electrons in different ways. Although researchers debate exactly what is happening in these various two-dimensional materials, they hope that growing superconductors will help them gain a more universal view of the fascinating phenomenon.Electron pairsKamerlingh Onnes observation case (and superconductivity appears. in other cold metals) finally cracked in 1957. John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer noticed that the temperature, the jittery atomic lattice of matter quiets down, so that other soft effects come through. Electrons slowly attract protons in the lattice, pulling them inward to create an excess of positive charge. This deformation, known as a phonon, can then attract a second electron, forming a “Cooper pair”. Cooper pairs can all merge into a coherent quantum entity in a way that a single election cannot. The resulting quantum soup has no friction between the atoms of matter, which normally blocks the flow of electricity. Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer’s phonon-based theory of superconductivity won them the Nobel prize in physics in 1972. But it turns out that’s not the whole story. In the 1980s, physicists discovered that copper-filled crystals called cuprates could superconduct at higher temperatures, where the jiggles of atoms scavenged phonons. Another similar example follows.
