Ultrasound experiment identifies new superconductor
With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.
With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.
Superconductivity
May 9, 2024
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Superfast levitating trains, long-range lossless power transmission, faster MRI machines—all these fantastical technological advances could be in our grasp if we could just make a material that transmits electricity without ...
Superconductivity
May 9, 2024
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Science is taking a step forward in the quest for superconductors that will not require ultra-high pressure to function, thanks to multinational research led by Xiaojia Chen at the University of Houston.
Condensed Matter
Apr 29, 2024
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Radiation from space is a challenge for quantum computers as their computation time becomes limited by cosmic rays. Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and University of Waterloo in Canada are now ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 29, 2024
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In a significant development in the field of superconductivity, researchers at The University of Manchester have successfully achieved robust superconductivity in high magnetic fields using a newly created one-dimensional ...
Superconductivity
Apr 24, 2024
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In some materials, spins form complex magnetic structures within the nanometer and micrometer scale in which the magnetization direction twists and curls along specific directions. Examples of such structures are magnetic ...
Condensed Matter
Apr 17, 2024
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The rapid progress of quantum simulators is now enabling them to study problems that before have been limited to the domain of theoretical physics and numerical simulation. A team of researchers at Google Quantum AI and their ...
Condensed Matter
Apr 5, 2024
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An international team including researchers from the University of Würzburg has succeeded in creating a special state of superconductivity. This discovery could advance the development of quantum computers. The results are ...
Superconductivity
Apr 4, 2024
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Neutrons are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, unlike protons and electrons. That means that while the electromagnetic force is responsible for most of the interactions between radiation and materials, neutrons ...
Nanomaterials
Apr 3, 2024
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A team of physicists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a new kind of small, highly sensitive gravimeter that can operate stably at room temperature. In their project, reported in the ...
Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials generally at very low temperatures, characterized by exactly zero electrical resistance and the exclusion of the interior magnetic field (the Meissner effect). It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. It cannot be understood simply as the idealization of "perfect conductivity" in classical physics.
The electrical resistivity of a metallic conductor decreases gradually as the temperature is lowered. However, in ordinary conductors such as copper and silver, impurities and other defects impose a lower limit. Even near absolute zero a real sample of copper shows a non-zero resistance. The resistance of a superconductor, despite these imperfections, drops abruptly to zero when the material is cooled below its "critical temperature". An electric current flowing in a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
Superconductivity occurs in a wide variety of materials, including simple elements like tin and aluminium, various metallic alloys and some heavily-doped semiconductors. Superconductivity does not occur in noble metals like gold and silver, nor in pure samples of ferromagnetic metals.
In 1986 the discovery of a family of cuprate-perovskite ceramic materials known as high-temperature superconductors, with critical temperatures in excess of 90 kelvin, spurred renewed interest and research in superconductivity for several reasons. As a topic of pure research, these materials represented a new phenomenon not explained by the current theory. In addition, because the superconducting state persists up to more manageable temperatures, past the economically-important boiling point of liquid nitrogen (77 kelvin), more commercial applications are feasible, especially if materials with even higher critical temperatures could be discovered.
See also the history of superconductivity.
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