For years some physicists have been hoping to crack the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity—the ability of some complex materials to carry electricity without resistance at temperatures high above absolute zero—by simulating crystals with patterns of laser light and individual atoms. Now, a team has taken—almost—the next-to-last step in such "optical lattice" simulation by reproducing the pattern of magnetism seen in high-temperature superconductors from which the resistance-free flow of electricity emerges.
"It's a very big improvement over previous results," says Tilman Esslinger, an experimentalist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was not involved in the work. "It's very exciting to see steady progress."
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