In today's issue of the journal Nature researchers report they have developed a material that is superconducting in one direction but is a normal conductor in the other direction, a superconducting diode, something that had previously been thought to be impossible. They used a 2D layer of a compound made of bromine and niobium (Nb3Br8) that is only a few atoms thick. It only works at liquid helium temperatures, 3.86K or below, but they're currently working on something that works at liquid nitrogen temperatures ,77K, because liquid helium is about as expensive as champagne but liquid nitrogen is about as expensive as milk. But even at the lower temperature this is a big deal. Mazhar Ali, the chief researcher, is quoted as saying "*Technology that was previously only possible using semiconductors can now potentially be made with superconductors using this building block. This includes faster computers, as in computers with up to terahertz speed, which is 300 to 400 times faster than the computers we are now using*." I'm sure this will also be of enormous interest to those wishing to make a quantum computer.
The field-free Josephson diode in a van der Waals heterostructure <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04504-8> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> asd -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv337bDKN%3DV32huN81fQeocKYfyxeFt3dPnaiOyV4skJYw%40mail.gmail.com.
