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, exhibit no electrical resistance; this means that it takes very little energy to induce an electrical current in them.