One of the most remarkable and unexpected discoveries of the 20th century is that some materials can become "superconductors" when cooled down to very low temperatures. This means that they can conduct electricity with no resistance and are used in applications ranging from MRI scanners and particle accelerators to the "maglev trains" that move without touching the ground.
Liquid helium or nitrogen are used to cool most materials down to low enough temperatures so they become superconductors and then they stay that way. But as this is expensive and impractical, physicists have for decades tried to find new materials where the phenomenon exists at room temperature, which has proven difficult. An international research team I am a part of has now come up with a new technique to induce superconductivity at high temperatures by shining lasers on the material, which could pave the way for superconductors that can work at room-temperature.
While this is just a first step, the returns could one day be huge. Just as the creation of semiconductors laid the foundations for the entire digital world, a room-temperature superconductor could launch a similar technological revolution. It would make electronic devices more efficient and which require less power consumption and could even herald new technologies such as ultra-fast switches that could replace transistors, currently used to flip electrical signals in computers.
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