Interesting. Maybe a hoax. Might be true but displaying distance limits to the effect. For those not up on superconductivity...
According to John Bardeen and his assistants Cooper and Schreifer (sp?), superconductivity is a second-order phase transition. They got a Nobel Prize in physics for their work. It is all about quantum-level alignment.
Let's compare this to simple magnets. Remember that if you have an insulated copper wire coil wrapped around an iron core and power it up, you get an electromagnet because the coil electrons are spinning around that iron core in an aligned manner. Aligned, spinning electrons create the magnetic field. Permanent magnets exist because the atomic-level "magnetic domains" within the material are spin-aligned. It is the alignment of spin inside the metal that defines the magnetic domain.
You might recall that magnets lose magnetism if they get hot enough to reach the Curie temperature, the point at which so-called valence electrons gain enough energy to do spin-flips. At the Curie point, they lose that alignment. But what does that have to do with it?
I said the magnetic domains exist because at the atomic level, the electron domains of the magnetic material are spin-aligned as well. So you have a bunch of electrons all spinning the same way, and spinning electrons form aligned electromagnetic fields. Therefore, a permanent magnet is that way because (at the moment) Its unpaired valence electrons have mostly aligned spins forming atomic-level magnetic fields that combine to form macro-level magnetic fields. Magnetism is therefore a type of quantum coupling based on spin alignment.
If we talk about "super-conducting" then what is "ordinary conducting"? When we talk about electrons in metals, we have many layers of electrons. The inner layers are all paired in what are called orbitals. Their pairing at inner layers includes that their spins are paired up with other electrons with opposite spins - so they balance out. But when we get to the highest layer of electrons in a metal - the valence electrons - some of the orbitals are NOT paired up and so we can see some interesting effects. If the metal is in a situation where an electric current tries to flow through it, the electrons can jump into the vacant orbitals (just passing through). The more unpaired orbitals there are in the valence electron level, the lower the resistance. Electrical resistance occurs when the metal resists that electron exchange. More places to make the exchange generally means lower resistance.
Remember that Schrodinger's equations are about the probability of an electron being in a particular place. If an electron has more possible places to be with similar probabilities for each place, its resistance to being here or there - or someplace else - is reduced. Conductivity in general simply has to do with how probable or improbable it is for those electrons to move from place to place.
Semiconductors (most notably studied by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain - and yes, it is the same John Bardeen who got the Nobel prize mentioned earlier - his second one) are just metals that normally have high resistances to this electron exchange. If you apply an electrical field to them, the metals allow much easier electron exchange. The electric field imposed on the base of a transistor acts like the on/off switch for very high or much lower resistance. The energy applied to the base of that transistor either raises or lowers something called the "conduction band" which relates to the energy required for current flow.
Superconductivity is a similar effect but dealing with electrons doing spin-alignment at a different level. Just like we have atoms that display distant coupling - quantum entanglement - we can have atomic orbitals that can couple at a distance. In superconductivity, instead of adding a bias to lift the conduction band, we are removing interference from other sources.
The reason we need to cool down superconductors is simple... thermal noise! The natural randomness of electric orbitals occurs because the atoms are vibrating with their natural heat energy. Those random vibrations make distant coupling impossible. They act like (actually, they are the source of) static in an electrical circuit. Turn up an audio amplifier with no input signal and listen to hear this effect, usually audible as a hissing noise.
But if you cool things down enough and have the right materials, the "thermal" electrons settle down to their minimum energy levels. When the noise gets out of the way, non-adjacent atomic orbitals can "sense/see" each other and can align. Alignment again has to do with the probability of electrons being here or there. This alignment allows electrons to jump seamlessly to other similarly aligned orbitals. Superconductivity is then nothing more than a form of quantum alignment that makes it easy for electrons to move from place to place based on playing with electron probabilities.
theconversation.com
