In an effort to understand and perfect superconductors, an international team of researchers has developed a new method for creating and manipulating a widely studied class of high-temperature superconductors.
Superconductors, when cooled to a critical temperature, are able to conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy. These materials have fascinated physicists for decades because they are able to achieve a state of perfect conduction, allowing electric current to flow indefinitely. Most superconductors exhibit this feature only at very low temperatures, a few degrees above absolute zero, making them impractical.
New work published in scienceIt describes experiments that arise from theoretical calculations, such as those conducted by a Rutgers team led by Jedediah Pixley, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers.
The predictions were confirmed
The experiments confirmed the predictions of Jedediah Pixley and Pavel Volkov, who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Rutgers Center for Materials Theory.
These predictions, based on mathematical models designed by the researchers to represent fundamental quantum physical behavior, predicted how copper superconductors would behave if they were placed close together in specific configurations and at different angles.
Superconductors in our daily life
Superconductors are already in use today. Since the 1970s, scientists have used superconducting magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields needed to operate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. Magnetic levitation trains using this technology were introduced in the 1980s. More recently, scientists have harnessed the power of superconducting magnets to direct electron beams in experimental devices such as synchrotrons and accelerators.
In the future, scientists envision a world in which ultra-efficient power grids, ultra-fast and energy-efficient computer chips, and even quantum computers, are powered by new types of superconducting materials.
Promising experiences
New experiments that proved the validity of the ideas of Pixley and Volkov were conducted by a team fromHarvard university Led by professor and physicist Philip Kim.
” We took two copper superconductors – which are really interesting materials – and by putting them together and twisting them in precise ways, we created something else that is very interesting: another superconductor that could have many technological applications. said Jedidiah Pixley, a condensed matter theorist.
Because of its unique properties, the new superconductor is a promising candidate for the world's first high-temperature superconducting diode, which is essentially a switch that controls the flow of electrical current, the researchers said. Such a device could support emerging industries, such as quantum computing, that rely on ephemeral phenomena produced in materials such as superconductors.
Towards new experiences
Jedediah Pixley, who joined the Rutgers faculty in 2017, earned his PhD studying the conditions involved in producing superconductivity in unconventional materials. The latest research expands the field ofcom.twistronic“, which involves twisting flat layers of two-dimensional materials to produce physical effects at the subatomic level that can be observed at the macroscopic level.
” It will be very interesting to extend these experiments to other configurations of superconductors – twisted monolayers and some twisted multilayers of superconductors with small twist angles. “Jedediah Pixley added.
Other researchers on the study include scientists from the University of British Columbia, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Leibniz Institute for Solids and Materials Research in Germany, Seoul National University in South Korea, and the National Institute of Materials Science in Japan.
Article: “Time-reversal symmetry breaks superconductivity between twisted copper superconductors” – DOI: doi: 10.1126/science.abl8371
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