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No-one was willing to build the machine, so we decided to do it ourselves. We built our own fabrication facility - a superconducting electronics foundry - to produce the processors required to use quantum effects to compute.

Our results show that, despite still needing efforts in terms of reproducibility of the assembly process and of AC loss reduction, this design is a promising and viable solution for high current-capacity cables made of coated conductors.

An international team led by University of Toronto physicists has developed a simple new technique to induce high-temperature superconductivity in a semiconductor for the first time - using Scotch Tape.

This technology is now moving towards the pre-commercial stage through already announced or under discussion multi-hectometre cable projects. However, these multi-filamentary wires are expected to be replaced in the near future by a generation of cheaper HTS tapes, the Coated conductors (CC). According to their final report, SUPER3C is one of the first cables in the world using second generation (2G) HTS tapes as current carrying elements. The 2G-hybrid conductor utilises the advantages of both superconductivity and copper, enabling it to work and interconnect smoothly with conventional network components.

Using advanced electron diffraction techniques, the scientists discovered that orbital fluctuations in iron-based compounds induce strongly coupled polarizations that can enhance electron pairing—the essential mechanism behind superconductivity.

An international team of researchers at the University of Vienna unveiled the superconducting pairing mechanism in Calcium doped graphene using the ARPES method. Their results are published in the reputed journal Nature Communications.

We studied a thin superconducting NbN film in magnetic fields up to 8 T above the zero-temperature limit by means of time-domain terahertz and scanning tunneling spectroscopies in order to understand the vortex response. Scanning tunneling spectroscopy was used to determine the optical gap and the upper critical field of the sample. The values obtained were subsequently used to fit the terahertz complex conductivity spectra in the magnetic field in the Faraday geometry above the zero-temperature limit. These spectra are best described in terms of the Coffey–Clem self-consistent solution of a modified London equation in the flux creep regime.

This manuscript reports on the recent progress and the remaining materials challenges in the development of coated conductors (CCs) for power applications and magnets, with a particular emphasis on the different initiatives being active at present in Europe. We first summarize the scientific and technological scope where CCs have been raised as a complex technology product and then we show that there exists still much room for performance improvement. The objectives and CC architectures being explored in the scope of the European project EUROTAPES are widely described and their potential in generating novel breakthroughs emphasized. The overall goal of this project is to create synergy among academic and industrial partners to go well beyond the state of the art in several scientific issues related to CCs' enhanced performances and to develop nanoengineered CCs with reduced costs, using high throughput manufacturing processes which incorporate quality control tools and so lead to higher yields. Three general application targets are considered which will require different conductor architectures and performances and so the strategy is to combine vacuum and chemical solution deposition approaches to achieve the targeted goals. A few examples of such approaches are described related to defining new conductor architectures and shapes, as well as vortex pinning enhancement through novel paths towards nanostructure generation. Particular emphasis is made on solution chemistry approaches. We also describe the efforts being made in transforming the CCs into assembled conductors and cables which achieve appealing mechanical and electromagnetic performances for power systems. Finally, we briefly mention some outstanding superconducting power application projects being active at present, in Europe and worldwide, to exemplify the strong advances in reaching the demands to integrate them in a new electrical engineering paradigm.

Furthermore, a curious result of the present investigation is that there is no change in the superconducting transition temperature (Tc) up to a doping level of 10 wt%.

Recent results on powder-in-tube in situ Cu-sheathed MgB2 wires have shown that copper powder additions to the core can accelerate the formation of MgB2, increasing its volume fraction and greatly decreasing the amount of Mg–Cu intermetallic phases present in the core after heat treatment. The amount of added copper and heat treatment conditions strongly affect the critical current of the wire and require optimization.

These results verify that the developed DC superconducting cable is reliable and fulfils all the requirements necessary for successful use in various power applications including railway systems.

Applications for superconducting wires, which carry electricity without resistance when cooled to a critical temperature, include underground transmission cables, transformers and large-scale motors and generators. But these applications require wires to operate under different temperature and magnetic field regimes.  

In the same way that metamaterials steer light around objects to hide them, they might also steer electrons through crystal lattices with zero resistance, say physicists.

Energy. The Equinox Summit held in Waterloo Canada 2011 (2011 Equinox Summit: Energy 2030 http://wgsi.org/publications-resources) identified electricity use as humanity's largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Our appetite for electricity is growing faster than for any other form of energy. The communiqué from the summit said 'Transforming the ways we generate, distribute and store electricity is among the most pressing challenges facing society today.... If we want to stabilize CO2 levels in our atmosphere at 550 parts per million, all of that growth needs to be met by non-carbon forms of energy' (2011 Equinox Summit: Energy 2030 http://wgsi.org/publications-resources). Superconducting technologies can provide the energy efficiencies to achieve, in the European Union alone, 33–65% of the required reduction in greenhouse gas emissions according to the Kyoto Protocol (Hartikainen et al 2003 Supercond. Sci. Technol.16 963). New technologies would include superconducting energy storage systems to effectively store power generation from renewable sources as well as high-temperature superconducting systems used in generators, transformers and synchronous motors in power stations and heavy-industry facilities. However, to be effective, these systems must be superior to conventional systems and, in reality, market penetration will occur as existing electrical machinery is written off. At current write-off rates, to achieve a 50% transfer to superconducting systems will take 20 years (Hartikainen et al 2003 Supercond. Sci. Technol.16 963).

Practical conductors require acceptance of less than perfect superconducting behaviour because such conductors actually operate continuously in a slightly resistive mode