Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is A Superconductor?

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

How does a super conductor work? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, when you think of physics, what images come to mind for you? I think of the cosmos, I think of planets, I think of the fire inside the sun,

I think of crazy people with weird hair. When you look in the mirror or when you think of physics? What's the difference? Well, what about a dance party? I wouldn't say that's in the top 1,000 associations I have. Maybe not even in the top 5,000. Well, it turns out that physics and dance actually have a lot in common. They have a lot of fun connections.

Is that right? Yeah, they can help us understand the topic of our podcast today. That's right. Thinking about the way people dance and the way they shake their booty can actually help you understand the physics, the crazy topic of today's podcast. So get out there, shake your booty and get ready to download some physics into your brain. Get into the groove. It's time for physics. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And I'm Daniel.

Welcome to our podcast, Dancing with Physicists. How far can you get across the universe by just dancing? No, we're just kidding. You're not the victim of clickbait. This is the podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. In which we take something weird, something fascinating in the universe, and try to explain it to you, sometimes using dance. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about a physics phenomenon that is everywhere. It's everywhere, and it's helping make some of the greatest, scientific experiments in the world.

That's right. It's really important. It's fascinating. It's weird. It's quantum. And yet it's not really very well understood. And most important, it's super. That's right. And it conducts. What?

It's conductive. There you go. That's right. The topic of today's podcast is Superconductors. What are they? Who are they? Why are they super?

No, superconductivity. A fascinating question. Something behind a lot of really interesting research in the last few decades and something we thought was worth getting into because there's a lot of puzzles there. Yeah. I was just thinking the first time I heard about superconductor was in the 80s, right? And that's when it sort of became this big buzz about it. That's right.

They had a lot of big advances in the 80s. How old were you in the 80s, Jorge? I was old enough, apparently. to read about science news. But you would always see it tied to this footage of this little magnet floating on top of something. Yeah, that's like a classic application of superconductivity. Yeah, so like I think forever,

that's what people think of. A lot of people think of when they think of superconductors, like that one image. Yeah, there's that. There's also the superconducting super collider that they were going to build in Texas in the 90s. That was going to cost a huge amount of money and that they canceled halfway through.

And so a lot of people connect those two phrases, superconducting and super colliding. Oh, yeah. I didn't hear about that one in the 80s. So it sort of seems like it's been out there in the popular culture for a while, but we were wondering how much people knew about it. And, you know, it's part of the popular culture

and that people maybe have heard about it or whatever. Strangely, it hasn't really entered, like, you know, comic books or science fiction that much. You don't see like superconducting technology all over the place in science fiction. You mean you haven't seen that comic book called The Superconductor? Adventures of Crime Fighting Superconductor.

That's right. During the day, he's just a mild-mannered regular bus conductor, but at night. He's a super-duper conductor. No, I haven't seen that. And you don't see it playing a prominent role in science fiction movies. particle physics is everywhere in science fiction movies. The Higgs boson explains everything and causes problems, et cetera.

But you don't see superconductivity used and abused much in popular culture. Do you, have I missed it? Yeah, I don't know. I guess it's not flashy, right? It's not a word that sounds as cool as quantum or lasers. Or Higgs boson, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, so I went around campus and I asked people,

do you know what superconductivity is? Can you explain it? Do you understand it? Here's what people had to say. What about superconductivity? Have you heard of that? Yes. Could you explain that? No.

Best guess. Maybe it has to do conductors and force and stuff. Okay. Yeah, I've also heard of it, but I also have no idea either. Okay. It's a phenomenon that happens at very low temperatures because electrons have very low resistance to movement. due to the very slow vibrations of the matrix of a metal, the nucleus of the atoms,

so the electrons have a lot more space to move through something along those lines. Cool. Well, is that the one with the magnets, and they could float? That's about all I know about that one? No, I can guess, though. What's your best guess? A conductivity with, like, wires, for example, or, like, metal,

so it's super conductive, and it's a good conductor, doesn't burn out. Cool. I would assume that it has something to do with objects that are conductive. All right. Yeah, so I like the person who said that it has something to do with conductors and force and stuff. That's right. And there's somebody out there who clearly is reading the same magazine you were because they're like, oh, it has to do with magnets that can float.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you know which clip I'm talking about? I feel like they use the same clip for years and years and years and years and years. Yeah, I totally know what you mean. a little black magnet floating over a very cool surface with like liquid hydrogen sublimating off of it. It's pretty cool looking. Yeah.

And then somebody comes and pokes the magnet and it just keeps floating there. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So people had some sense. You know, they knew what it was. Nobody was like, I've never heard that word before. What are you talking about? Right.

But nobody could explain it to me. Like some people knew you had to be cold to be a superconductor, but nobody could give me a solid explanation for what it was and how it worked. Right. I guess this one has something. being understandable, which is a conductor. And, you know, I guess people in high school figure out or learn that

it's something that conducts electricity. And so a superconductor must just be something that is super at it. That's right. It's awesome at conducting electricity, right? That should be the next discovery. Awesome conductors. That's right.

Superconductors, last year. This year, awesome conductors. Next year, Uber conductors. But there is really something special about superconductors, which is, not just that they can conduct a lot, but that they conduct with no resistance at all, right? You can't have anything better than a superconductor.

So it is pretty amazing. And they are really important for things like particle physics, right? Yeah, they have a lot of really cool applications. So it's like a physics phenomenon that has really great applications for important experiments, like the Large Hadron Collider. That's right. And it's also a really fun physics puzzle. You know, the kind of physics that I do personally,

like take everything apart and understand the smallest bits. That's totally worthwhile, obviously, and leads to deep insights. But there's a whole different other kind of way of doing physics. That's like, can we put things together in a weird way that makes weird materials? You know, we have lots of materials around us on Earth that we're familiar with, but you can think, like, can we rearrange those bits to make new kinds of stuff? So there's a whole group of people out there in physics departments who's basically all their job is to make new kinds of goo, right?

Like, let's mix this together and add a little bit of that and a little bit of this. Maybe if we zap it with a laser, we'll get this weird crystal with strange behaviors that, like, nothing, anybody's ever seen before. Are you talking about solid state physics? Yeah. These days, I think they call it condensed matter physics. Condense matter. But essentially, yeah. It's like, can we build new kinds of stuff?

It's like the properties of bulk materials, you know? Not individual particles, but, like, what happens when you put all these different kinds of particles together in a certain lattice in a certain, in a certain, in a certain, arrangement do they behave in strange ways and what can we learn about you know what solids can and cannot do right because they do different things right like you can make things behave in a totally different and new way just by the way you arrange them yeah and you know the periodic table is the first lesson of that everything in the periodic table is made out of the same bits right protons neutrons and electrons but they're pretty different right uranium is pretty different stuff than lithium for example and so you can get an incredible variety

of behaviors just by rearranging the same stuff. And so solid state physics, that whole field is just taking that to an extreme. It's like how can we combine these elements and zap them and chill them and heat them and do all sorts of crazy stuff? It's basically like cooking, right? What kind of cakes can you make with the same ingredient?

Right. That tastes totally different. Exactly. And can float above your countertop. Right? Superconducting cakes. That's the next breakthrough. This is just rename that department, stuff physics. Or physics stuff. Physics of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. The physics of stuff. Yeah, hey, stuff is pretty interesting, right? It's good stuff. There's a whole podcast called Stuff You Should Know, how stuff works. Oh, my goodness. We should join that podcast network. I think they're stuffed pretty full.

Cool, so let's get into it, all right, and let's break it down. So, what's a superconductor? Let's start with just the conductor part. Let's dig in a little bit into what it means to be a conductor. Right. So a conductor is something where electricity can move through it, right? And you have to understand that electricity moving through it is not necessarily the same as like electrons flowing through it. You put electricity on one side of a wire and you get electricity on the other side of the wire.

It's tempting to think about it like a hose. Like you put water on one side and water comes out the other side. Like a tube. Yeah, like a tube. and you know what happens is you put electrons in on one side and the electrons all sort of shift over like it's like a tube full of water you put a little bit of water in the front

and a little bit of a different piece of water that was already in there pushes out the side it's kind of like if you have a tube and you blow in it the air that comes out at the other end is not necessarily the air that came out of your mouth it's like it causes some sort of it pushes all the air through and the ones that come out are the ones that were

waiting closest to the end Exactly. And that's only possible if the electrons can move, right? And so a conductor is just any material where you have electrons that can jump from atom to atom, right? Think about a material and a microscopic scale. It's really a bunch of atoms, right? And if it's simple or regular, then it's like a lattice, like a grid. It's like regularly distributed atoms. And the electrons can jump from one to the other. So if you blow on one side, you like push in some electrons on one side, then all the electrons sort of hop over one slot and you get some out the other side. Oh, it's kind of like playing hot potato. Yeah, exactly. And the difference between something that can conduct electricity, a conductor, and something that can't, an insulator, is that conductors have enough electrons that can jump between atoms, whereas insulators have all their electrons held really tight by each of those atoms in the grid so that there's no way for the electrons to jump from one to the other.

So conductors have these free electrons that are sort of just like floating around happily. Okay, so something that is not a conductor doesn't have kind of a spare electrons, or they don't let electrons fly around freely. Yeah, exactly. And so, and you just, you know, you put electrons on one side and they just go nowhere, right? So you can't get electrons through the material. Okay, so why not? So if I introduce an electron in an insulator, it's something that doesn't conduct, what's going to happen to the electron? It won't go through.

Yeah, it just won't cause a current, right? You can't get a current through there. You can't get all the electrons to jump over one atom, for example. Okay, so it's kind of like a conductor has a bunch of atoms, and everyone kind of has, everyone's pretty loose with their electrons. That's right. Like, hey, here's one. Oh, I'll take one.

All right, I'll give you another one. Oh, electrons can just kind of flow through from atom to atom. Yeah, and it's best to think of them really as a lattice because these atoms individually act a little different than they do when they're together in a material. And when they're together in a material, the electrons slosh easily back and forth between them for a conductor, for an insulator that doesn't happen. And then, of course, there's lots of different kinds of conductors, the things that are good conductors and things that are bad conductors. And by a lattice you mean like a grid or like a rack, like the electrons, are arranged kind of like in rows and in columns, right?

Yeah, exactly. If you zoom in on a crystal, for example, or a piece of metal, anything that has a regular arrangement of the atoms, you'll see that they're organized in this pattern, right? They're built out of these basic units and that they're pretty regular. You know, there's like lines of atoms. It's not just like a big heaping mess, right? These solids, these metals, these things that are conductors, are pretty well organized. And so you'll see them in rows and that's what we mean by the lattice.

Yeah, just like a grid of atoms. Yeah. And so you're saying electrons can flow through or jump freely between atoms, but not perfectly, right? That's right. And here's where the temperature comes in. So the colder the material is, think about what temperature really is. What is temperature? It's how much the atoms inside something are wiggling.

The atoms inside liquid are wiggling more than the atoms inside a solid, right? Which is why it's liquid. And the atoms inside a gas are totally free and bouncing around everywhere. But even inside a solid, even if it's solid, you have different temperatures, right? You can have a piece of metal that's hot or a piece of metal that's cold. What's happening there is that the atoms are moving less. They're wiggling less. And as it gets colder and colder, they wiggle less and less and less.

And this is important for the electron because, remember, it's trying to jump from atom to atom. That's easier when the atoms are not wiggling around, when they're like regularly spaced rows. Yeah, like when they're frozen in place. Yes, exactly. Here's where the dance analogy comes in, right? Imagine trying to walk through a crowd and everybody's like jumping. It's like a mosh pit, right? And they're going crazy into a pug concert or something.

It's really hard to get across a crowded room if everybody's jostling and bouncing and moving around a lot. it's much easier if they're calm if they're like you know slow dancing or something it's kind of like yeah you would if it's a mosh pit and everyone's moving and dancing you would just kind of lose a lot of energy just kind of bumping against people and just trying to make it through exactly you would lose a lot of energy that's exactly right it's the resistance right so electrical resistance is electrons losing energy as they bump into the atoms that are wiggling around. Because they're moving? Like, it's related to the kinetic motion of the atoms? Yeah, absolutely. It's related to the kinetic motion of the atoms. It makes it harder for the electrons

to get through. And as they get through, they lose some energy. Right. Okay. So that's resistance, right? That's V-Ego-I-R. The resistance of a wire or a conductor, that's what it is. It's like electrons going through, but sort of bumping too much into the atoms. That's right. And so things that are conductors have low resistance. And you want to use things that have low resistance so that most of the energy you're sending along a wire, for example, gets there. If you use something with low resistance like copper or gold, then most of the energy you put into a wire will get to the other side.

If you use something with really bad resistance, with a lot of resistance, then it'll heat up the wire. That energy from the electrons will create resistance, which turns into heat, and that's not good. But sometimes you sort of want resistance, right? Like in circuits, some resistors are sometimes good. Yeah, sometimes you want resistance, so you can put it in. on purpose. For example, a light bulb, that's a resistor, right? What it does is it steals

the energy from the electrons and it heats up the material, which then glows and gives you light. Awesome, if that's what you wanted, right? But you don't really want the wires in your house glowing. You want them to transmit that energy to your iPhone or whatever it is you were sending. And those power lines along the road, right? We don't want those heating up and melting. We want those to transmit the energy from the power station to your house without losing much energy. Unless your house is a dance floor, that would be pretty cool. I mean, like...

Well, how are you going to power those speakers without the electrons, right? Well, the speakers would glow too. Sounds like an awesome party. Send me an invite. And I think that brings us to the cool point, which is that the resistance of a conductor depends on the temperature. Yeah, exactly. So as it gets colder, the lattice, this grid of atoms gets more regular

and it gets easier for the electrons to get through. And so the resistance goes down with temperature. So a hot wire is hard to get electrons through it because all the abs are moving more. But a cold wire lets the electrons flow more easy. That's right. All right, cool. That's a conductor, not somebody who drives a bus

or directs an orchestra. That person is also a conductor? Yeah, yeah. But is he a superconductor? Is he resistant? Does he glow? That's right. Does he steal energy from innocent electrons?

All right, that's a conductor. And now let's get into superconductors. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, so fill us in. What is a superconductor and what is so super about them? Superconductors are really pretty super. The thing that makes them super is that they have zero resistance. Not just like very small, not like epsilon resistance, but zero.

Like 0.000, zero. Keep going with the zeros there, man, because it's zero all the way. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It means that, for example, if you had a loop of superconducting wire, you could put a current into it and it would just zoom around it forever. It would like never get used up. It's a pretty hard concept to imagine.

It's like living in a world without friction. It's like imagine you had a sheet of ice and you pushed a block on it, right? You expect it to go for a while and then eventually slow down because every surface has some friction. But what if you had a perfectly smooth surface with no resistance and you pushed it, it would just go first? it's like a perpetual motion machine yeah sort of like that or is it kind of like if you if you're out in space and you start spinning something atop it's just going to keep spinning for a long time because there's nothing there's no air no resistance no nothing to stop it from spinning that's right yeah exactly and so a superconductor is something that has zero resistance and so the electrons can just

flow right through it it's pretty amazing all right so let's get into how that works and And I think what's cool, I heard, is that physicists don't really know what's going on. Yeah, well, there are different kinds of superconductors, and some of them are pretty well understood, the old-fashioned ones, the classic ones. But recently they've made a bunch of really strange superconductors that nobody really understands in great detail. I mean, we have some simulations we can describe it, but a lot of it's just too complicated to write down equations on paper that we can understand.

Okay, so there's different flavors of superconductors. Yeah. The first thing that all have in common is that you've got to get it cold. Like we were saying earlier, you want to lower the resistance, first get it cold. And so chill that thing down. And people built refrigerators to get things down to like really, really, really cold temperatures, like 10 or 20 degrees Kelvin. You know, that's like just above absolute zero. And the point is that when it gets colder, that cold, the grid in the material stops moving. It stops vibrating. right? That's right. And you can't get anything down to actually absolute zero, but you can get it down really, really cold and the grid stops vibrating, as you say, and then it gets easier and easier for electrons to go through. And so that will bring you

down to low resistance, even very low. Some might even say super low, but it won't get you all the way down to zero resistance. Oh, I see. If you just had a regular, like if I took a copper wire and I froze it to almost zero Kelvin, it would give me

pretty low resistance, but not necessarily zero resistance. I don't actually know if copper can become a superconductor but I just mean that chilling it down is not all the explanation. To explain how something loses its resistance, you need more than just understanding that it gets colder

and therefore it's easier for the electrons to go through. You need there's another piece of the explanation. There's some extra magic going on there. Some extra dance magic. Yeah, exactly. Because physics, if you just think about the temperature, physics says you shouldn't have superconductors. But we do have them. It was

in the early part of the 20th century that people made superconductors and observed it and people thought, what? How is this even possible? And then the theorists spend decades thinking about it and trying to come up with explanations. Like, we know this exists, right? This is one of my favorite things in science. When we have something,

we know it exists, but we don't know how it can work. Like, it doesn't seem like it should be possible, yet here we have one. And then one night, they went dancing, and they figured it all out. That's right. That's right. They were getting knocked over in a mosh pit and when they woke up from their concussion they had a brilliant idea well that's that's kind of

the analogy here right like um if you're this is a dance party and there's a mosh bit and people are jumping and going crazy it'd be really hard to go through it but if you suddenly turn out the music and everyone did the mannequin challenge it would be a lot easier to walk through it but it wouldn't be perfectly easy to go through it you still might bump into people or rub against people and so the resistance would be low, but not zero. That's right. So to get down to zero and took a really clever bit of thinking by theorists to explain how this could work.

And it comes down to a concept called Cooper Pairs. And the short version of the explanation is that electrons don't go through individually. They gather together into pairs, like pair dancing, like square dancing or waltzing or whatever. Oh, my goodness. The dance analogies don't stop. Why should they, right?

It's a dance party until the end of time. And going through in pairs, they can accomplish actually zero resistance. Okay, so it's sort of related to some quantum effects, right? Like at some point, to get to zero resistance, you need that sort of quantum magic to make it happen. Yeah, which is really awesome because it's really fun when quantum mechanics is not just like hidden under the rug, some tiny little effect that only affects tiny particles, when it actually gives you a macroscopic thing that you can measure, that you can see, you can prove, look, quantum mechanics is real.

And this is an example of that. And to understand it, the little bit of quantum mechanics you need to know is just that electrons are a certain kind of particle, we call them fermions. And that kind of particle doesn't like to share. It doesn't like to be in the same state as another kind of particle. So you can't have two electrons both occupying, for example, the lowest rung on the energy ladder of an atom. They don't like to be in the same one. So if there's one already there, the next one will fill the second rung,

and the next one will fill the third rung. They don't all like to hang out together on the bottom rung. Right. Usually they like to dance saloo. That's right. Exactly. They all think they're the best dancer ever and they just dance by themselves and the dance floor. But what happens when you get two of them together is that they act like the other kind of quantum particle. We call those bosons. And bosons are totally happy to pile up on top of each other.

They can occupy the same state, no big deal. Maybe you've heard of a Bose-Einstein condensate. That's an example of a bunch of bosons getting really, really cold and all sitting in exactly the same quantum state, the lowest energy state, and then they all act together and do really weird quantum effects. We should do a whole podcast on the Bose-Einstein condensate. That's pretty cool stuff. But there's something going on because normally electrons don't like to pair up like this,

but when you cool down a superconductor, suddenly it becomes possible and even preferable for them to pair up. Yeah, well, electrons are both negatively charged, right? And so they don't like to hang out with each other. They repel each other quite a bit. but you only need a very slight attraction these Cooper pairs are not like they're not like really bound tightly together

they're just sort of like loosely associated you know they're like two people eyeing each other across the dance floor sending signals back and forth so can you describe the effect here like why do they pair up and how that helps them flow through the material the reason they pair up

is that they essentially they deform the lattice in the same way so like they're moving through the lattice together there's grid of atoms and you know think of the lattice like you might think of like a mattress, right, like on your bed. If you sit down on the mattress, it makes a depression in it, right? If somebody else sits on the mattress, it also makes a depression.

And which way are you most likely to roll, right? If there's a depression on the mattress and another one next to it, you're going to lean in towards the center, right, unless you have like a really awesome, very expensive mattress. But making one depression makes you attracted to the next depression, right? And so that's what kind of brings the electron. together. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. They sort of shake the lattice in this way that makes them more likely to be closer to each other than further apart. And it has to be cold because if the whole bed is shaking and moving, you know, this effect is not going to matter. Be careful. Pretty soon we're going to be doing analogies involving dancing and beds, and you know where

that's going to go. Dirty dancing. Yeah. Keep your dancing 100% vertical here, folks. Oh, I see. Why are you going with that? The hokey-pokey. So the electrons are moving through the lattice,

and they like to stay together. There's a very small, attractive force that keeps them in pairs. They don't like touch. It's not like it's a new particle with a minus two charge or anything. They're just sort of like grouped together as they move through the lattice. And because the electrons by themselves are fermions, things that don't like to share states, but together they're bosons,

then they act differently. If you heard, for example, of liquid helium, liquid helium is a super fluid. It's something that can flow without any resistance. And the reason is that helium is a boson, right? The atom itself is a boson. And when it gets really, really cold, it can flow without resistance.

And so electrons are kind of like that. When they get really, really cold, they pair up, and these Cooper pairs are bosons, so they can share states just like liquid helium matter. and then they can slide through the lattice with basically zero resistance. It's sort of incredible. It's kind of like individually,

there is this whole mess of atoms blocking their way, but once they pair up, it's almost like the loss of physics, they're operating under a different set of laws of physics almost. And so then suddenly the highway opens up in front of it. Yeah. Yeah, it's like following somebody through a dance floor is easier than going through the dance floor yourself, right?

and so two people moving through a dance floor together sort of orbiting around each other a little bit can just sort of make the other dancers move out of their way in just the right way for them to slip through without feeling any resistance it's like crowd surfing exactly it's like crowd surfing and it's a subtle effect you know this attraction between the electrons is small and so it took people a long time to understand this there were a lot of crazy ideas people had to explain superconductivity most of which were wrong and this one crazy idea, which turned out to be true. And so that's why they'd have to be cold so that there's sort of room for these electrons to get together.

That's right. Superconductivity was discovered in materials like 10 or 20 degrees Kelvin, and as we said, that's necessary to have the regular lattice and to have this thing happen. And also this attraction between the electrons is very fragile. And so if things are too hot, then that attraction is hard to make. And so for a long time, people thought,

Well, superconductors are cool. They have cool applications. But, geez, if you've got to be 20 degrees Kelvin, that's not very practical. You know, you're not going to have the wires in your house being 20 degrees Kelvin. That's super cold. Okay, let's get into the different flavors of superconductors. But first, let's take another break. the holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight.

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Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so, Daniel, you were telling me that there are different flavors of superconductors, like superduper conductors. Well, they're all superconductors, but they're made in different ways, different kinds of materials. So for like 50 years, there were only a few superconductors that were known. But then in the 80s, probably described by this magazine article you read, there was a breakthrough. People found superconductors that could work at relatively high temperatures, you know, up to like maybe between 30 and 100 degrees Kelvin. That's still super cold. I mean, I think parts of Canada might be 100 degrees Kelvin right now.

And these are like metals or I think I read their ceramics, right? They're not just all metals. Some of them are ceramics. Yeah, some of them are ceramics, exactly, which really surprised people. But they can do superconductivity at fairly high temperatures, you know. First it was 30 degrees, and then 50 degrees, and then 60 degrees, and these days they're up above 100 degrees Kelvin, which is still pretty cold, but it's getting closer to, like, the liquid nitrogen level where you can get something cold pretty cheaply. If you need something down like 10 degrees Kelvin, you have to have super world-class refrigeration and liquid helium, which is all very hard. If you only need something pretty cold, you can use liquid nitrogen, which is cheap and easily available, and so may be practical.

Yeah. Now you can just go down to the store and pop open a bottle of liquid nitrogen. nitrogen. That's right. And this is a pretty exciting field because every few years, like a new kind of materials discovered that can do superconductivity at a higher temperature. It's like every five years, I'm just like, hey, look, I zapped this with this new kind of goo, and then I smeared peanut butter on it and dunked it in liquid nitrogen and fried it in the microwave. And look, now it's a superconductor. I think your colleagues are probably regretting how we talk to you at this point. Probably. I mean, not literally. They're not actually using peanut butter. But they are just

exploring wacky stuff and sometimes they're surprised. Like there's an amazing kind of superconductor that uses these graphene sheets, right? This really weird arrangement of carbon. If you take two of them, two sheets and you twist one at just the right angle, then the sheets together can act like

a superconductor. And you were saying that these high temperature superconductors, they're the ones that we don't really understand. Yeah, because remember to have superconducting materials, you need these Cooper pairs to move through the materials. So you need their electrons to be attracted to each other somehow, but that attraction is very, very, very

low. And so if the material's hot, then that attraction is basically nothing compared to the energy of the electrons and the energy of the lattice. And so it's hard to understand how that works. And there are a lot of smart people working right now on theories of high-temperature superconductors. And, you know, they have some tools. They have good simulations that can describe this and describe that. But it's not as far advanced as the theories of low-temperature superconductors. And that's important because we'd like to predict. like, hey, will this material be a superconductor or what material should we make

in order to have superconductors that work at room temperature? That's the final goal. And so nobody really understands how these works, and it's kind of hard because you can't just sort of like poke it, right? You can't just sort of open it up and look at what's going on. You have to kind of use theory

and simulations. Yeah, exactly. It's a complicated problem. But it's really interesting. People love making new kinds of stuff and trying to get it to do weird things and understanding these mysteries. I think it's really fun. These guys have a lot of fun building these simulations

and thinking about it. And, you know, I ask them, like, do you think there will ever be room temperature superconductors? And nobody wants to say yes because that's predicting the future. But there is a lot of confidence

because every few years we get a new kind of superconductor that's warmer than any of the others. And so if that continues, you know, in other few decades, we might get superconductors that are at fairly warm temperatures. It's all about finding the right recipe.

Exactly. It's finding the right recipe, kind of ingredients, mix them in the right kind of way, zap them with the right kind of laser, all this kind of stuff. Do a dance a certain way. Yeah, exactly. You've got to do the dance.

Okay, so that's superconductors and how they work. But sort of their biggest application is kind of not really in conducting electricity. It's more in magnets, right, and making super magnets. That's right. Of course there's a connection because

how do you bank an electromagnet, right? How do you make a magnet that you can turn on and off? You do that by having something which conducts electricity. You make a loop of current because a loop of current will make a magnet. And so if you have something which can do superconducting electronics, then you can have current flowing through at a really high rate and it doesn't heat up and break down or anything. And so you can get really strong magnets.

Oh, it lets you make magnets that you can turn on and off. It's like an electric magnet. Yeah, electro-magnets. You can turn them on and off. You can dial their strength up and down, which is really important for a particle collider. And if you use superconductors, then there's no resistance,

and so you can really get really strong magnets. Yeah, exactly. And you want really strong magnets that are pretty small. They don't take, you know, they're not like the size of a school bus or something. So you want them to be powerful, you want them to be small, and that's what we need at the particle collider.

And also you want super-strong magnets. for other things. Like, who doesn't want to ride in a magnetically levitating train? That would be awesome, right? Yeah, those are the maglev ones in Japan, right? Yeah, exactly. And so the stronger the magnets, the easier that technology is, the more

practical that technology is, right? And so, superconductors play a lot of role in making really strong magnets. But then also vary directly. You know, you want superconductivity? Well, it would be great to have in your transmission lines, like we were saying earlier. Your electricity would be cheaper.

if you could get it straight from the power station without losing any energy, right? They lose a significant fraction of the energy they generate just in sending it to us. Oh, my gosh. So if you can, if you find a recipe for a room temperature superconductor, you would revolutionize everything, right?

You would be a zillionaire and you could just dance all night and not have to worry about anything ever again. Seriously, that would be a zillion dollar invention, room temperature superconductors. You would have an electric grid with no, loss, like your phone wouldn't heat up and lose energy. Wow. Yeah, plus it would be a fascinating mystery of physics. Like, how does that happen? How is it possible? I love when we can create

stuff that we don't understand because it gives us like a concrete hook into some mystery of the universe, something that says, there's something here that will teach you a lesson. There's some insight here waiting for you to discover. And of course, there could be insights anywhere. You never know. But when you have something physical that you don't understand, you know there's an insight there. This is like a concrete clue you can follow up, you know? So to me, that's very exciting. Wow. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that we can safely conclude that superconductors have to do with conductors and force and stuff. And dance. And dancing. So we have danced our way through this topic and we hope that you enjoyed it and that you now understand a little bit

more about superconductivity. So go out there and find a pair to dance with. And they don't necessarily have to be called Cooper. That's right. And they even can have the same charge, right? Sometimes opposites attract. Sometimes electrons attract. Oh, my goodness.

How many times can we dance around this pun? I don't know. I think we're breaking down. Or break dancing. We broke the dance. All right, guys. joining us. See you next time. See you next time.

If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories

I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hi, it's Honey German and I'm back with season two of my podcast

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