Room-temperature superconductors could transform everything from electrical grids to particle accelerators to computers, but researchers are still trying to understand how these materials function on the atomic level.
Superconductivity
Jun 14, 2022
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High temperature superconductivity is something of a holy grail for researchers studying quantum materials. Superconductors, which conduct electricity without dissipating energy, promise to revolutionize our energy and telecommunication ...
Superconductivity
May 20, 2022
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Researchers from PSI's Spectroscopy of Quantum Materials group together with scientists from Beijing Normal University have solved a puzzle at the forefront of research into iron-based superconductors: the origin of FeSe's ...
Superconductivity
May 19, 2022
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Initially regarded as a scientific curiosity upon its discovery in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, superconductivity has provided physicists with numerous theoretical challenges and experimental surprises. From the development ...
Superconductivity
Mar 22, 2022
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Researchers have known about high-temperature superconducting copper-based materials, or cuprates, since the 1980s. Below a certain temperature (approximately -130 degree Celsius), electrical resistance vanishes from these ...
Superconductivity
Jan 28, 2022
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Electrons flowing through power lines and computers inevitably encounter resistance; when they do, they lose some of their energy, which dissipates as heat. That's why laptops get hot after being used for too long and why ...
Superconductivity
Jan 13, 2022
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Scientists understand quite well how temperature affects electrical conductance in most everyday metals like copper or silver. But in recent years, researchers have turned their attention to a class of materials that do not ...
Condensed Matter
Jan 12, 2022
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Superconducting materials show zero electrical resistance at low temperatures, which allows them to conduct "supercurrents" without dissipation. Recently, a group of scientists led by Dr. Kazumasa Iida from Nagoya University, ...
Superconductivity
Dec 17, 2021
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Superconductivity is the disappearance of electrical resistance in certain materials below a certain temperature, known as "transition temperature." The phenomenon has tremendous implications for revolutionizing technology ...
Superconductivity
Dec 13, 2021
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Even after more than 30 years of research, high-temperature superconductivity is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of materials physics. The exact mechanism that causes certain materials to still conduct electric ...
Superconductivity
Oct 25, 2021
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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.
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