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SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

Supercurrents in magnetic materials heat up

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 137–138 (2022)Cite this article

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Previous demonstrations of long-range supercurrents through magnetic materials were achieved only at liquid helium temperatures. Now, using specially tailored samples, long-distance supercurrents have been realized at temperatures as high as 40 K.

Superconductivity and magnetism are not normally friends. Over the past two decades, however, researchers have figured out how to get supercurrents to travel much further through magnetic materials than was previously thought possible1. Those advances have all occurred in samples made with conventional superconducting materials, in experiments at extremely low temperatures — typically 4.2 K above absolute zero. What about the high-temperature superconductors that made such a big splash in 1987? Shouldn’t we be able to play the same tricks with them? Now, writing in Nature Materials, that is just what Jacobo Santamaria, Javier Villegas and collaborators have demonstrated2. In their samples, the supercurrent travels a distance of 1 μm — a very long distance compared with atomic scales — at temperatures up to about 40 K.

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Fig. 1: Device structure and characterization.

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  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Norman O. Birge

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  1. Norman O. Birge
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Correspondence to Norman O. Birge.

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Birge, N.O. Supercurrents in magnetic materials heat up. Nat. Mater. 21, 137–138 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01189-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01189-8

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