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UBC Team Key Contributor to Superconductor
Discovery: Solves 20-year-old Mystery
Vancouver, BC, 31 May 2007: A team of
University of British Columbia researchers has
contributed to the greatest advancement in superconductor research in a decade
by “growing” the purest samples of superconductors to date.
Superconductors are a class of materials that
conduct electricity with no resistance. They are already used in MRI medical
imaging scanners, levitating trains, and power lines. High temperature
superconductors have no resistance at temperatures as high as –140 degrees
Celsius, but advances in this area have been stalled due to a lack of
understanding of their fundamental properties.
“Up to now, it was unclear whether these
materials were metals or insulators,” said UBC Physics Prof. Douglas Bonn,
adding that the materials are extremely sensitive to contamination -- the
slightest trace of dirt or impurity can alter their properties completely.
“We were able to supply our collaborators with
the purest sample ever developed, leading to the discovery of quantum
oscillations,” said Bonn. “This provides unequivocal proof that these materials
are metals.”
The UBC team also includes Prof. Emeritus Walter
Hardy and Materials Scientist Ruixing Liang.
Findings of the project, led by Université de
Sherbrooke physicist Louis Taillefer and involving researchers and funding from
the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), are published in today’s
edition of the journal Nature. The experiments were carried out at the
National Pulsed Magnetic Field Laboratory in Toulouse, France.
“The results are crystal clear,” said Taillefer. “High-temperature
superconductors were discovered in 1987, and only now do we finally have
concrete knowledge about their deep nature. This discovery gives both theorists
and experimentalists something real to work with.”
Despite their name, high-temperature
superconductors cannot function in temperatures higher than 100 degrees Celsius
below zero. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to the ultimate goal
of creating room-temperature superconductors, which could result in laptop-sized
MRI machines, loss-less power lines, and vast improvements in computers and
wireless communications.
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