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There are times when superconductors—materials through which electric current can travel without resistance and thus without losing energy—don’t live up to their reputation. Nadya Mason of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been making strides toward understanding when and how electron energy loss, or dissipation, arises in otherwise superconducting systems. She had planned to share this work in the Edward A. Bouchet Award Talk at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society earlier this month. (The meeting was canceled due to concerns about the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, but Physics is reporting on some of the results that would have been presented.)
Modern technology is largely based on normal conductors, but electrical currents in these materials always dissipate some energy as heat. “Superconductors give us a great opportunity to save energy by reducing dissipation,” Mason says. “But in order to use superconductors, we have to understand how dissipation affects them in particular, and how to minimize [dissipation] and control it.”