Latest Superconductivity Stories

When high-temperature superconductors were first announced in the late 1980s, it was thought that they would lead to ultra-efficient magnetic trains and other paradigm-shifting technologies.That didn't happen. Now, a University of Florida scientist is among a team of physicists to help explain why.In a paper set to appear Sunday in the online edition of Nature Physics, Peter Hirschfeld, a UF professor of physics, and five other researchers for the first time describe precisely how the...

What could be better than diamond when it comes to a superhard material for electronics under extreme thermal and pressure conditions? Quite possibly BC5, a diamond-like material with an extremely high boron content that offers exceptional hardness and resistance to fracture, but unlike diamond, it is a superconductor rather than an insulator. A research team in China studying BC5 describes its potential in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of...

Material's fluctuating response to a magnetic field could lead to switchable superconducting wiresA team of scientists from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has fabricated thin films patterned with large arrays of nanowires and loops that are superconducting "” able to carry electric current with no resistance "” when cooled below about 30 kelvin (-243 degrees Celsius). Even more interesting, the scientists showed they...

New materials yield clues about high-temperature superconductorsA team of U.S. and Chinese physicists are zeroing in on critical effects at the heart of the latest high-temperature superconductors -- but they're using other materials to do it.In new research appearing online today in the journal Physical Review Letters, the Rice University-led team offers new evidence about the quantum features of the latest class of high-temperature superconductors, a family of iron-based compounds called...

New images of iron-based superconductors are providing telltale clues to the origin of superconductivity in a class of ceramic materials known as pnictides. The images reveal that electrons responsible for the superconducting currents in some pnictides tend to flow primarily along the boundaries between the crystal grains that make up the superconductors. The research, which is reported in a pair of papers appearing in the current issue of the journal Physical Review B, may help physicists to...

Researchers at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC, and the firms Labein Tecnalia and Nexans, coordinated by the electrical company Endesa, have constructed a 30m cable and the terminals needed to connect it to the network using the high-temperature superconducting material BSCCO. This is the most advanced cable in terms of distribution (24 kV), since its current value is higher than that obtained up to date, 3200 Amperes RMS, and therefore can transport the electrical strength...

Award-winning materials expert and UH grad returns with SuperPower, IncAlthough the U.S. electric power industry is one of the greatest engineering marvels of the 20th century, aging technology and an increase in demand create problems for the electricity infrastructure that need to be fixed.Venkat Selvamanickam, director of the Applied Research Hub and the M.D. Anderson chair professor of the department of mechanical engineering, University of Houston, is developing a technology with high...

Study paves way for development of nanocircuits for energy, electronics applicationsScientists have discovered the world's smallest superconductor, a sheet of four pairs of molecules less than one nanometer wide. The Ohio University-led study, published today as an advance online publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, provides the first evidence that nanoscale molecular superconducting wires can be fabricated, which could be used for nanoscale electronic devices and energy...

Controlling structure on the nanoscale could lead to better superconductorsSuperconductors, materials in which current flows without resistance, have tantalizing applications. But even the highest-temperature superconductors require extreme cooling before the effect kicks in, so researchers want to know when and how superconductivity comes about in order to coax it into existence at room temperature. Now a team has shown that, in a copper-based superconductor, tiny areas of weak...

Brown University physicist Vesna Mitrovic and colleagues at Brown and in France have discovered magnetic waves that fluctuate when exposed to certain conditions in a superconducting material. The discovery may help scientists understand more fully the relationship between magnetism and superconductivity at the quantum level. Results are published in Physical Review Letters.At the quantum level, the forces of magnetism and superconductivity exist in an uneasy relationship. Superconducting...