New law for superconductors
MIT researchers have discovered a new mathematical relationship — between material thickness, temperature, and electrical resistance — that appears to hold in all superconductors. They describe their findings in the latest issue of Physical Review B. The result could shed light on the nature of superconductivity and could also lead to better-engineered superconducting circuits for applications like quantum computing and ultralow-power computing. “We were able to use this knowledge to make larger-area devices, which were not really possible to do previously, and the yield of the devices increased significantly,” says Yachin Ivry, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, and the first author on the paper. Ivry works in the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group, which is led by Karl Berggren, a professor of electrical engineering and one of Ivry’s co-authors on the paper. Among other things, the group studies thin films of superconductors. Superconductors are materials that, at temperatures near absolute zero,...