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17 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 18, 2026.
Scanning 3D X-ray diffraction at the upgraded European Synchrotron showed a lanthanum cuprate divided into orthorhombic and tetragonal regions with boundaries hundreds of times wider than expected. The team says those boundaries likely fight superconductivity and that bulk measurements will need reinterpreting.
The National University of Singapore team used 0.14-terahertz radiation, whose photons carry just 0.6 millielectronvolts, to warm the charge carriers and nothing else. The trick separates two effects that every conventional measurement blurs together.
Simulations of a single stripe in a cuprate model show electron pairing carried by 'spinon singlets.' Switch off the magnetism and the pairs vanish; switch it back and they return. The team predicts a two-lattice-site shift that microscopes can check.
Okayama University physicists used nuclear magnetic resonance to find three distinct phases in potassium chromium arsenide, evidence that it is a spin-triplet superconductor — the type that could host particles useful for error-free quantum computing.
A second graphene sheet less than a nanometer away drained the interactions between electrons. The superconducting transition fell by more than a factor of ten, which is not what phonon theory predicts.
A Chinese-led team put niobium diselenide inside a terahertz 'dark' cavity and raised its critical temperature without touching it, driving it, or shining anything on it.
Two laser pulses — one to scramble the electrons, one to read them out — settled a long-running argument about how a second charge pattern forms in erbium tritelluride.
Tsinghua researchers imaged individual Zhang-Rice singlets in a copper-oxide crystal, then watched them merge into larger structures as they added charge — the missing step between a single hole and superconductivity.
Chalmers University researchers etched nanoscale ridges into a substrate to keep an ultrathin superconducting film stable at higher temperatures and under stronger magnetic fields.
A superconducting calorimeter at Aalto University detected just 0.83 zeptojoules — a sensitivity that could sharpen quantum computers and even help hunt for dark matter.
Using a custom quantum twisting microscope, Xiao, Inbar, Birkbeck and colleagues directly imaged the flat bands of twisted bilayer graphene with momentum resolution, revealing energy gaps, electronic cascades and a 'Dirac revival' that could finally explain how the material superconducts at temperatures rivaling exotic high-temperature compounds.
Breakthrough experiment reveals unexpected synchronized movement that challenges 70-year-old theory of superconductivity.
A study in Physical Review Letters shows that paired particles in a near-absolute-zero gas move in coordinated patterns the BCS theory never predicted, opening a path to room-temperature superconductors.
Breakthrough imaging reveals synchronized behavior of particle pairs that was never predicted by 70-year-old Nobel Prize-winning theory.
A new class of bulk crystal synthesized at MIT creates conditions in which electrons behave as if propagating through 4D space — a result with sweeping implications for superconductivity and commercial quantum materials.
A University of Houston team used a 'pressure quenching' technique on mercury-based copper oxide to exceed the previous record set in 1993, pushing toward the holy grail of room-temperature superconductivity.
Researchers at the Université de Genève and the University of Salerno have experimentally detected the 'quantum metric' — a curvature of the quantum space inside materials — proving that electrons follow bent paths analogous to how Einstein's gravity bends light, with implications for terahertz electronics and superconductivity.