Physicists have found "electron pairing," a hallmark feature of superconductivity, at temperatures and energies well above the critical threshold where superconductivity happens.
Superconductivity
4 hours ago
1
118
During the last five years, few scientists have successfully employed very high pressures in order to produce metal hydrides, rich in hydrogen, which become superconductive around -20 degrees Celsius. This so-called transition ...
Superconductivity
Aug 15, 2019
0
49
In spring 2018, the surprising discovery of superconductivity in a new material set the scientific community abuzz. Built by layering one carbon sheet atop another and twisting the top one at a "magic" angle, the material ...
Superconductivity
Jul 31, 2019
5
745
High-temperature superconductivity is one of the big mysteries in physics. Milan Allan's research group used a Josephson Scanning Tunneling Microscope to image spatial variations of superconducting particles for the first ...
Superconductivity
Jul 25, 2019
0
46
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits. It easily switches from ...
Nanomaterials
Jul 17, 2019
0
1109
Phase transitions occur when a substance changes from a solid, liquid or gaseous state to a different state—like ice melting or vapor condensing. During these phase transitions, there is a point at which the system can ...
Superconductivity
Jun 28, 2019
0
2
Researchers at MIT have collaborated with a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Google to conduct a multiyear investigation into ...
General Physics
May 28, 2019
0
266
University of Chicago scientists are part of an international research team that has discovered superconductivity—the ability to conduct electricity perfectly—at the highest temperatures ever recorded.
Superconductivity
May 22, 2019
8
10976
Superconductors' never-ending flow of electrical current could provide new options for energy storage and superefficient electrical transmission and generation, to name just a few benefits. But the signature zero electrical ...
Nanophysics
May 21, 2019
0
105
Like a metal python, the huge pipe snaking through a CERN high-tech hall is actually a new electrical transmission line. This superconducting line is the first of its kind and allows vast quantities of electrical current ...
Superconductivity
Apr 19, 2019
0
44
High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc or HTS) are materials that have a superconducting transition temperature (Tc) above 30 K, which was thought (1960-1980) to be the highest theoretically allowed Tc. The first high-Tc superconductor was discovered in 1986 by Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987. The term high-temperature superconductor was used interchangeably with cuprate superconductor until Fe-based superconductors were discovered in 2008. The best known high-temperature superconductors are bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, BSCCO and yttrium barium copper oxide, YBCO.
High-temperature has three common definitions in the context of superconductivity:
Technological applications benefit from both the higher critical temperature being above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen and also the higher critical magnetic field (and critical current density) at which superconductivity is destroyed. In magnet applications the high critical magnetic field may be more valuable than the high Tc itself. Some cuprates have an upper critical field around 100 tesla. However, cuprate materials are brittle ceramics which are expensive to manufacture and not easily turned into wires or other useful shapes.
Two decades of intense experimental and theoretical research, with over 100,000 published papers on the subject, has discovered many common features in the properties of high-temperature superconductors, but as of 2009[update] there is no widely accepted theory to explain their properties. Cuprate superconductors (and other unconventional superconductors) differ in many important ways from conventional superconductors, such as elemental mercury or lead, which are adequately explained by the BCS theory. There also has been much debate as to high-temperature superconductivity coexisting with magnetic ordering in YBCO, iron-based superconductors, several ruthenocuprates and other exotic superconductors, and the search continues for other families of materials. HTS are Type-II superconductors which allow magnetic fields to penetrate their interior in quantized units of flux, meaning that much higher magnetic fields are required to suppress superconductivity. Their layered structure also affects their response to magnetic fields.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
