That didn't happen. Now, a University of Florida scientist is among a team of physicists to help explain why.
In a paper appearing in the online edition of Nature Physics, Peter Hirschfeld, a UF professor of physics, and five other researchers for the first time describe precisely how the atomic-level structural elements of high-temperature ceramic superconductors serve to impede electrical current. Their explanation for how "grain boundaries" separating rows of atoms within superconductors impede current is the first to fit a phenomenon that has helped keep the superconductors from reaching their vaunted potential -- and puzzled experimental physicists for more than two decades.
"Nobody understood why it was such a strong effect, or why the current was so limited by these grain boundaries," Hirschfeld said. "And that is what we have explained in this paper."
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