Researchers observed the new phases in superconductor interactions, which could help build more robust superconductors.
Credit: JILA/Steven Burrows
Superconductivity makes physics seem like magic. At cold temperatures, superconducting materials allow electricity to flow indefinitely while expelling outside magnetic fields, causing them to levitate above magnets. MRIs, maglev trains and high-energy particle accelerators use superconductivity, which also plays a crucial role in quantum computing, quantum sensors and quantum measurement science. Someday, superconducting electric grids might deliver power with unprecedented efficiency.
Yet scientists lack full control over conventional superconductors. These solid materials often comprise multiple kinds of atoms in complicated structures that are difficult to manipulate in the lab. It’s even harder to study what happens when there’s a sudden change, such as a spike in temperature or pressure, that throws the superconductor out of equilibrium.
Quantum theory has predicted intriguing behaviors when a superconductor is driven out of equilibrium. But it has been challenging to perturb these materials in the lab without disrupting their delicate superconducting properties, leaving these predictions untested.
However, scientists can obtain surprisingly deep insights into superconductivity by studying it with fully controllable arrays of atoms in a gas. That is the approach of a research collaboration at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.
In their latest work, JILA researchers caused a gas of strontium atoms to act like a superconductor. Even though the strontium atoms themselves are not superconducting, they follow the same rules of quantum physics. The researchers could make atoms in a gas interact in a way that preserves the sorts of interactions responsible for superconductivity while suppressing other competing, complex interactions. By throwing the atoms out of e ..
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