For the first time, scientists have directly imaged the quantum process underlying superconductivity, a phenomenon in which paired electrons cause electric current to flow without resistance at sufficiently low temperatures.
The results weren’t quite what they expected.
In the study, published April 15 in Physical Review Letters, the scientists directly imaged individual atoms pairing up in a special gas cooled nearly to absolute zero — the unreachable limit to how cold things can get. The type of gas, called a Fermi gas, allows scientists to substitute electrons with atoms and probe the physics of superconductors in a controlled way.
Surprisingly, the scientists found that after pairing up, the atoms moved in a synchronized dance, with their positions dependent on those of other pairs — a phenomenon not predicted by the 70-year-old, Nobel Prize-winning theory of superconductivity.
“Our experiment showed that something is qualitatively missing from this theory,” says experimental research lead Tarik Yefsah of the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Yefsah and other experimental physicists at CNRS collaborated on the new study with theoretical physicists, including Shiwei Zhang of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute.
The findings add an important new detail to scientists’ fundamental understanding of superconductivity and could aid in the search for room-temperature superconductors, a holy grail of modern physics that would enable ultra-efficient electric grids and electronic devices.
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