Superconductors are getting edgy.
For the first time, scientists have spotted a superconducting current traveling along the edge of a material, like a trail of ants crawling along the rim of a dinner plate without venturing into its middle.
Normally, such superconducting currents, in which electricity flows without any loss of energy, permeate an entire material. But in a thin sheet of molybdenum ditelluride chilled to near absolute zero, the interior and edge make up two distinct superconductors, physicist Nai Phuan Ong and colleagues report in the May 1 Science. The two superconductors are “basically ignoring each other,” says Ong, of Princeton University.
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