Superfast levitating trains, long-range lossless power transmission, faster MRI machines — all these fantastical technological advances could be in our grasp if we could just make a material that transmits electricity without resistance — or ‘superconducts’ — at around room temperature.
In a paper published in the May 10 issue of Science, researchers report a breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of superconductivity at relatively high (though still frigid) temperatures. The findings concern a class of superconductors that has puzzled scientists since 1986, called ‘cuprates.’
“There was tremendous excitement when cuprate superconductors were discovered [in 1986], but no understanding of why they remain superconductive at such high temperatures,” says Shiwei Zhang, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ). “I think it’s surprising to everybody that almost 40 years later, we still don’t quite understand why they do what they do.”
In the new paper, Zhang and his colleagues successfully re-created features of cuprate superconductivity with a simple model called the two-dimensional Hubbard model, which treats the materials as if they were electrons moving around a quantum chessboard. The breakthrough comes only a few years after the same researchers demonstrated that the simplest version of this model couldn’t perform such a feat. Such straightforward models can spark a deeper understanding of physics, says study co-author Ulrich Schollwöck, a professor at the University of Munich.
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