Super Silicon: Top semiconductor turns into a superconductor

While not yet leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, silicon is doing something pretty super these days—conducting electricity with zero resistance.

The material achieved that triumph when physicists in France crammed unprecedented numbers of boron atoms into a silicon wafer’s surface. When cooled to less than 0.4 kelvin, the boron-laden silicon permitted electrons to flow unimpeded, the scientists report in the Nov.