* Astronomy

Using New Tool, Scientists Uncover a Delicate Magnetic Balance for Superconductivity

A new imaging technology is giving scientists unprecedented views of the processes that affect the flow of electrons through materials.
By modifying a familiar tool in nanoscience - the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope - a team at Cornell University's Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics have been able to visualise what happens when they change the electronic structure of a "heavy fermion" compound made of uranium, ruthenium and silicon. What they found sheds light on superconductivity - the movement of electrons without resistance - which typically occurs at extremely low temperatures and that researchers hope one day to achieve at something close to room temperature, which would revolutionize electronics.

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Superconductivity is an electrical resistance of exactly zero which occurs in certain materials below a characteristic temperature. It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon.
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A new spin on superconductivity?

MIT scientists have synthesised, for the first time, a crystal they believe to be a two-dimensional quantum spin liquid: a solid material whose atomic spins continue to have motion, even at absolute zero temperature.
The crystal, known as herbertsmithite, is part of a family of crystals called Zn-paratacamites, which were first discovered in 1906. Physicists started paying more attention to quantum spin liquids in 1987, when Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson theorised that quantum spin liquid theory may relate to the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity, which allows materials to conduct electricity with no resistance at temperatures above 20 degrees Kelvin (-253 degrees Celsius).
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