Topic
Superconductivity research, explained
11 open-access superconductivity studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can one compact photon detector carry gigabit laser links from space?
A four-output superconducting nanowire detector counted single photons fast and efficiently enough to receive laser data at over a gigabit per second using only a couple of photons per bit, while tolerating daylight-level noise.
- Can a water-based ink of 2D sheets superconduct?
A water-based ink of single-layer tungsten disulfide sheets can be printed into films that superconduct below about 7 kelvin, resist in-plane magnetic fields unusually well, and survive a month in air.
- Can stretching a cuprate vertically raise its superconducting temperature?
Embedding a cuprate superconductor inside a stiffer partner material stretched its crystal layers vertically near their shared walls and raised the superconducting transition to about 50 K, above what ordinary films of this compound reach.
- Does a twisted MoTe2 bilayer superconduct in an unusual way?
Short junctions of twisted bilayer MoTe2 carried supercurrent that survived higher fields and temperatures than the superconducting contacts and was weakest at zero magnetic field, unlike an untwisted control.
- Does aluminum superconduct better when only a few atoms thick?
Ultrathin, clean aluminum films superconduct at roughly three times the temperature of bulk aluminum, and the enhancement grows steadily as the film gets thinner.
- Why does squeezed bismuth superconduct so strongly?
When pressure turns bismuth into a structure with mismatched, interpenetrating atomic chains, it becomes an unusually strong superconductor, likely because the chains can slide and create very soft vibrations.
- Can a superconductor induce pairing in a magnetic topological edge?
A narrow superconducting strip on the edge of a quantum anomalous Hall insulator turns incoming electrons into outgoing holes, showing superconducting correlations have leaked into the edge state.
- Do topological semimetals NbRuSi and TaRuSi superconduct unusually?
Ruthenium silicides NbRuSi and TaRuSi, which are topological semimetals, become superconductors that spontaneously generate tiny internal magnetic fields, a hallmark of unconventional pairing.
- How fast does a cuprate's superconducting order melt and recover?
By watching how a superconductor triples the frequency of terahertz light after a laser flash, the authors see its superconducting order collapse within a picosecond and recover in about nine.
- Can a tiny topological wire act as a switchable superconducting diode?
A topological-insulator nanowire between two superconductors carries more supercurrent one way than the other, and both the size and direction of this diode effect can be flipped with a magnetic field or a gate voltage.
- Why does a 2D superconductor keep a little resistance near zero kelvin?
In atom-thin lead superconductors, the leftover resistance of the 'anomalous metal' state appears while vortices sit still under the microscope, suggesting the measuring current, not quantum fluctuations, moves them.