superconductors

5 posts

Using superconductors to measure electric current

6 min read
Scicomm Bloch oscillation Josephson junction Josephson voltage standard metrology triangle National Institute of Standards and Technology Ohm's law Planck constant quantum Hall effect Shapiro steps SQUID superconducting quantum interference device superconductors thermal noise

Simply place two superconductors very close to each other, separated by a small gap, and you’ll have taken a big step towards an important piece of technology called a Josephson junction. When the tw…

A tale of vortices, skyrmions, paths and shapes

9 min read
Scicomm Science anyons BCS theory chiral magnets condensed matter physics David Thouless Kosterlitz-Thouless transition materials science Nanyang Technical University orbital angular momentum p-wave superconductor path dependency phase transition quantum computers quasiparticles Rashba-Edelstein effect s-wave superconductor skyrmion-vortex coupling skyrmions solid state physics superconductors supercurrent topological excitations topology Vijay Shenoy

There are many types of superconductors. Some of them can be explained by an early theory of superconductivity called Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. In these materials, vibrations in the ato…

The awesome limits of superconductors

8 min read
Scicomm Abrikosov vortex lattice Abrikosov vortices BCS theory Bose-Einstein condensate CERN Cooper pairs copper electrical conductivity electrical resistivity electrons flux-flow resistance Joule heating Large Hadron Collider Lisa Randall magnesium diboride magnetic flux Meissner effect niobium Pauli's exclusion principle Praveen Chaddah protons silver superconductors superfluid helium titanium type I superconductors type II superconductors vortex pinning

On June 24, a press release from CERN said that scientists and engineers working on upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had "built and operated … the most powerful electrical transmission l…

When cooling down really means slowing down

5 min read
Scicomm Albert Einstein atomic cooling atomic trap Bose-Einstein condensate Bose-Einstein statistics Carl Wieman Claude Cohen-Tannoudji collisional cooling diatomic molecules Eric Cornell Harvard University laser cooling Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy NaLi niobium nitride quantum chemistry quantum computing S Pancharatnam Satyendra Nath Bose Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam Sisyphus cooling spin polarization superconductors superfluids University of Waterloo Wolfgang Ketterle

Consider this post the latest in a loosely defined series about atomic cooling techniques that I've been writing since June 2018. Atoms can't run a temperature, but things made up of atoms, l…