the.com/superconductor
the material that lets electrons stop paying rent and travel forever, frictionless.
means A material that, when cooled below a critical temperature, conducts electricity with exactly zero resistance, so a current once started flows indefinitely without losing energy.
from A modern compound from the Latin pieces 'super-' (above, beyond) and 'conducere' (to lead together, from 'con-' plus 'ducere,' to lead). 'Conductor' was already doing service in physics for anything that carries current; the 'super-' was bolted on after 1911, when the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes chilled mercury near absolute zero and watched its resistance vanish entirely — a phenomenon he named 'superconductivity.' So the word is barely a century old, built from very old roots to describe something nature had been hiding in the cold the whole time.
- zero resistance
- Current can flow for billions of years unchanged
- levitation trick
- Repels magnetic fields and floats trains midair
- cold demand
- Most need temperatures colder than deep space
- MRI secret
- Hospital scanners run on superconducting magnets
- nobel magnet
- Won multiple physics prizes since 1913
ybco ceramic — yttrium barium copper oxide discovered in 1987, superconducts at 92k above liquid nitrogen temperature
niobium-titanium alloy — used in iter tokamak and large hadron collider magnets, superconducts at 10k
magnesium diboride — discovered 2001, superconducts at 39k with simple crystal structure