superconductor

Want a flying skateboard? Your own personal home fusion reactor? A wearable MRI scanner you can buy online? If a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconducting material really has been found, that is just the tip of the technological iceberg.

A brand new form of silicon might help extend its use into the future. Engineers at North Carolina State University have discovered a material called Q-silicon, with new properties that could have important uses in quantum computers and spintronics.

Scientists at the University of Rochester claim to have created a material that acts as a superconductor at room temperature and lower pressures than ever before. If confirmed, this “reddmatter,” as they call it, could mark a major breakthrough.

A TU Delft team has demonstrated a one-way superconductor that gives zero resistance in one direction, but blocks current completely in the other. The discovery, long thought impossible, heralds a 400x leap in computing speed and huge energy savings.

Superconductivity occurs when electrons in a metal pair up. Scientists in Germany have now discovered that electrons can also group together into families of four, creating a new state of matter and potentially a new type of superconductivity.

Graphene just keeps getting weirder. Engineers at ETH Zurich have now managed to tweak the overachieving material so that some parts of a flake can be an electrical insulator while other areas act as a superconductor, just nanometers apart.

Dark matter makes up the majority of matter in the universe, but it’s strangely shy about making its presence known. Now physicists have designed a new test to search for signs of two candidate particles, using the quirky world of quantum technology.

Some advanced electronic devices only function at extremely cold temperatures. Now engineers at NIST have developed a tiny cryogenic thermometer that uses a new mechanism to keep an eye on these sensitive instruments without taking up much room.

Superconductors – materials in which electricity flows without any resistance whatsoever – could be extremely useful. For the first time ever, engineers have created a superconductor out of a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

Superconductivity has come to play a powerful role in many modern day technologies, and scientists are now claiming a big breakthrough in this area, creating what they say is the first material capable of superconductivity at room temperature.

“Strange metals” exhibit some unusual conductive properties and surprisingly, even have things in common with black holes. Now, a new study has characterized them in more detail, and found that strange metals constitute a new state of matter.

Graphene is ultrathin, ultra-strong and has some weird electrical properties. MIT researchers previously found a strange pattern emerged in “twisted” graphene structures. Now they’ve studied it more closely and found it works better with more layers.