By Andrew Grant
A solid material that conducts electricity perfectly at certain temperatures may also qualify as an almost perfectly flowing liquid.
If the result is confirmed, the superconducting material would become the first nearly perfect fluid that isn’t among the hottest or coldest substances in the universe. The result also suggests a new way of deciphering a class of materials that could eventually whisk electricity around the power grid with no energy losses.
In 2002, researchers chilled a cloud of lithium atoms to less than a ten-millionth of a degree Celsius above absolute zero to create what’s called a Fermi gas. Three years later, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., slammed gold nuclei together to form a trillion-degree-C quark-gluon plasma, a substance thought to resemble matter in the universe just after the Big Bang.