Hi-Temperature Superconductors Can Now On/Off In One Trillionth Of Second!

Over 100 years after the discovery of superconductivity and nearly 25 years after the identification of high-temperature superconductors, a team of scientists and researchers at University of Oxford and the Max Planck Research Group for Structural Dynamics at the University of Hamburg have developed a superconducting switch using intense terahertz pulses. Further discovery in the subject could open the avenues for ultra-high-speed electronics. Superconductivity is a topic closely associated with physics but given its immense applications in electronics, the need of technological breakthroughs in superconductivity has become the need of hour.

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© J.M. Harms, Max Planck Research Group for Structural Dynamics

Every electrical conductor offers resistance to the flow of electrons. However, when special conductors are super-cooled below a characteristic temperature, they tend to lose this resistivity. Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was the first one to discover this effect in Mercury, back in 1911. Since then, number of attempts were made to induce superconductivity in materials at normal temperatures. The recent discovery of ultra-fast switch is being considered as a breakthrough in the superconductivity domain. The superconducting material used by the scientists has been known for long time. It is a crystal based on lanthanum cuprate (La2CuO4) to which a specific quantity of strontium has been added (La1,84Sr0,16CuO4). The crystal transitions into superconductor at -233°C. The crystal is formed by plates of copper and oxygen, like the pages of a book. The free electrons can move between these planes, however below 40K temperature, a link is established between these planes - which turns the crystal into a superconductor.

The researchers worked on whether the establishment of link can be turned on and off deliberately; and they found a solution by sending an ultrashort pulse of light through the planes. This pulse is called "terahertz pulse" and it is an electromagnetic wave, similar to light, but with a much longer wavelength. The researchers call this as a fascinating discovery. In future, this discovery might find real world applications - which means faster electronic devices which turn on and off before you blink your eye.

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