Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed new superconducting thin-films that could eventually lead to superconducting devices that will be faster and more power-saving. It’s very hard to engineer such materials and to make them useful, however, the researchers managed to rise the superconductivity temperature up to 50 Kelvins, about -370°F which is really high for conventional electronics.

“This work provides definitive proof of our ability to produce robust superconductivity at the interface of two layers confined within an extremely thin, 1-2-nanometer-thick layer near the physical boundary between the two materials. It opens vistas for further progress, including using these techniques to significantly enhance superconducting properties in other known or new superconductors,” said Ivan Bozovic, physicist BNL and leader of the research team.

The nanoscale superconductors are made of two layers that are not superconducting on their own, however, they manage to create a superconducting region at their interface.

“Further study of the temperature-enhancement mechanism might even tell us something about the big puzzle — the mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity, which remains one of the most important open problems in condensed matter physics,” added Bozovic.

Bozovic and his team began the research long time ago and in 2002 they noticed that the critical temperature can be elevated by 25% in two-layer copper materials, but they didn’t know that caused that elevation so they decided to go on with their research so they combined about 200 single, two-layer, and tri-layer thin films with superconducting, metallic, and insulating materials in order to see from where the superconductiong effect was coming.

“The greatest technical challenge was to prove convincingly that the superconducting effect does not come from simple mixing of the two materials and formation of a third, chemically and physically distinct layer between the two constituent layers,” explained Bozovic. “It is too early to tell what applications this research might yield, but already at this stage we can speculate that this brings us one big step closer to fabrication of useful three-terminal superconducting devices, such as a superconductive field-effect transistor.”

In conclusion, Bozovic said that “no matter what the applications, this work is a nice demonstration of our ability to engineer and control materials at sub-nanometer scale, with designed and enhanced functionality.” However, this technology would mean a lot as in superconducting devices we could change their properties to the resistive stats instantly therefore the electronic devices of the future will be a lot faster while these won’t need so much power.