original version of this story Appear in how many magazinese.
In 2024, superconductivity (the flow of electric current with zero resistance) was discovered in three different materials. Two examples expand the textbook understanding of this phenomenon. The third time completely shattered it. "This is an extremely unusual form of superconductivity, and many people would say it's impossible," said Ashvin Vishwanath, a physicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the discovery.
Superconductivity has fascinated physicists ever since Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first saw resistance disappear in 1911. How it happens is a pure mystery: The phenomenon requires a pairing of electrons that carry an electric current. Electrons repel each other, so how can we combine them?
Then there are the technological prospects: Superconductivity has already enabled the development of MRI machines and powerful particle colliders. If physicists can fully understand how and when this phenomenon occurs, perhaps they can design a wire that superconducts under everyday conditions, rather than only at low temperatures, as is currently the case. World-changing technologies — lossless power grids, magnetically levitated vehicles — may follow.
A series of recent discoveries have both deepened the mysteries of superconductivity and heightened optimism. “Superconductivity seems to be ubiquitous in materials,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a physicist at the University of Washington.
The findings stem from a recent revolution in materials science: All three new examples of superconductivity emerged in devices assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These materials exhibit unprecedented flexibility; at the push of a button, physicists can switch between conducting, insulating, and more exotic behaviors—a modern form of alchemy that fuels the search for superconductivity exploration.
Now it seems that there are more and more reasons for this phenomenon. Just as birds, bees and dragonflies all use different wing structures to fly, the materials appear to pair electrons together in different ways. While researchers are debating what exactly is going on in various 2D materials, they expect the growing menagerie of superconductors will help them gain a more general view of this tantalizing phenomenon.
Kamerlingh Onnes's observations (as well as the observation of superconductivity in other extremely cold metals) were finally solved in 1957. John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer discovered that at low temperatures, the material's tense atomic lattice quiets down, allowing more subtle effects to emerge. The electrons gently tug on the protons in the crystal lattice, drawing them inward to create an excess of positive charge. This deformation, called a phonon, can attract a second electron, forming a "Cooper pair." Cooper pairs can all come together into a coherent quantum entity in a way that individual elections cannot. The resulting quantum soup slides frictionlessly between the material's atoms, which would normally impede the flow of electricity.
Bardeen, Cooper and Schriever's theory of phonon superconductivity won them the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. But it turns out that's not the whole story. In the 1980s, physicists discovered that copper-filled crystals called cuprates could superconduct at higher temperatures, when the shaking of atoms washes away phonons. Other similar examples followed.