MIT Builds Microscope That Sees What No One Has Seen Before: Electrons 'Jiggling' Inside a Superconductor

Physicists at MIT have built a new kind of microscope that uses pulses of terahertz light to peer inside superconducting materials and directly observe a quantum phenomenon that has eluded experimentalists for decades — the collective, frictionless jiggling of Cooper pairs, the electron couplings responsible for zero-resistance electrical flow.

The research, led by postdoctoral researcher Alexander von Hoegen under the supervision of Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT, was published in February 2026 and has drawn renewed attention this month after a companion ScienceDaily summary highlighted its implications for room-temperature superconductor development and next-generation wireless communications. The team's key insight was finding a practical way around one of the most stubborn obstacles in terahertz physics: the diffraction limit.

Terahertz radiation — light with wavelengths between microwave and infrared, roughly a millimeter in scale — has long been attractive to physicists because its photon energies are perfectly matched to the quantum energy scales of superconducting electrons. But those same long wavelengths make it impossible to focus terahertz light sharply enough to study microscopic samples. An ordinary terahertz beam would illuminate an area thousands of times larger than the sample of interest, drowning the signal of interest in noise.

Von Hoegen and his colleagues solved the problem using spintronic emitters — devices made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers that generate sharp, localized pulses of terahertz light when illuminated by an ultrafast laser. By positioning these emitters in extremely close proximity to the sample, they confined the terahertz radiation before it had a chance to spread, effectively bypassing the diffraction limit that had blocked earlier attempts.

Using this technique, the team imaged a small, atomically thin sample of bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, a copper-oxide compound known as a high-temperature superconductor, at temperatures just above absolute zero where the material enters its superconducting state. In that state, they observed a previously unseen mode: Cooper pairs oscillating collectively at terahertz frequencies in what the team described as a "superfluid jiggle" — a coherent quantum motion of the entire superconducting condensate.

"This new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before," Gedik said in a statement published by MIT News. The discovery fills an important gap in the experimental toolkit for studying high-temperature superconductors, which remain poorly understood at a microscopic level despite decades of intense research.

The practical applications of the breakthrough extend in two directions. Understanding the microscopic dynamics of Cooper pairs in copper-oxide superconductors is considered one of the key steps toward designing materials that remain superconducting at room temperature — a long-sought goal that would revolutionize power transmission, MRI machines, maglev transportation, and quantum computing. Current high-temperature superconductors still require liquid nitrogen cooling to below minus 196 degrees Celsius.

In addition, the team showed that the same terahertz microscope can be used to characterize materials that emit and absorb terahertz radiation at the microscale — a capability directly relevant to the development of terahertz wireless communications. Communications engineers have long recognized that moving from today's microwave-based cellular networks to terahertz frequencies would enable data transmission rates tens to hundreds of times faster than current 5G systems. The bottleneck has been the lack of compact, efficient terahertz antennas and receivers. The new microscope provides a way to evaluate candidate materials for such devices at the scale at which they would actually be deployed.

The collaboration involved researchers from Harvard University and two Max Planck Institutes in Germany, reflecting the international character of the effort. The MIT team said it is now working to extend the microscope's capabilities to a wider range of superconducting and quantum materials.