So, last week, I talked about how superconductors work, and I have in the past talked about the idea of making cold atoms look like electrons. And obvious question, then, would be:
Do cold atoms systems allow us to learn anything about superconductivity? The answer here is, unfortunately, "Yes and no."
That's pretty weaselly, dude. Yeah, well, there's nothing I can do about that.
There are a huge number of experiments out there using ultracold atom systems to look at Bose Einstein Condensation, which is related to superconductivity, and that transition has been studied in great detail. Those experiments are necessarily done with bosons, though, and electrons are fermions. If you want to look at the superconducting transition, you need atoms that reproduce the spin characteristics of electrons, and then some way to create Cooper pairs with those atoms.
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