10/11/2023 0 Comments Condense link for youtubeElectrons deftly wended their way through the wire without generating heat when they collided with its atoms - the origin of resistance. The Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and collaborators cooled a mercury wire to about 4 kelvins (that is, 4 degrees above absolute zero) and watched with astonishment as the electrical resistance plummeted to zero. Physicists have struggled with superconductivity since it was first observed in 1911. “If this class of theory is correct,” Davis said, referring to the superexchange theory, “it should be possible to describe synthetic materials with different atoms in different locations” for which the critical temperature is higher. ![]() Room-temperature superconductivity would bring perfect efficiency to everyday electronics, power lines and more, although the objective remains a distant one. The research advances the perennial ambition of the field: to take cuprate superconductivity and strengthen its underlying mechanism, in order to design world-changing materials capable of superconducting electricity at even higher temperatures. “I’m amazed by the quantitative agreement,” said André-Marie Tremblay, a physicist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and the leader of the group that made the prediction last year. The new measurement matches a prediction based on the theory, which attributes cuprate superconductivity to a quantum phenomenon called superexchange. Séamus Davis, who led the new experiment at the University of Oxford. “I’ve worked on this problem for 25 years, and I hope I have solved it,” said J. “This evidence is really beautiful and direct,” said Subir Sachdev, a physicist at Harvard University who builds theories of the crystals, known as cuprates, and was not involved in the experiment. ![]() ![]() Electrons appear to nudge each other into a frictionless flow in a manner first suggested by a venerable theory nearly as old as the mystery itself. Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct - that is, carry an electric current without any resistance - at far warmer temperatures than other materials.
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