Brown researchers make superconductor find

PROVIDENCE – A team of Brown University physicists has discovered that pairs of electrons that form in superconductors can also form in the opposite way, as electrical insulators.
The breakthrough finding, published in Science, is a surprising addition to the understanding of superconductivity, a phenomenon discovered nearly a century ago.
How electrons reorganize to produce this behavior remained mysterious until 1957, when theoretical physicists John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer unveiled their Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer theory of superconductivity.
The theory shows that superconducting electrons form pairs – known as Cooper pairs – that correlate their motion with other electron pairs to flow smoothly and infinitely. Cooper, currently the Thomas J. Watson Sr. Professor of Science at Brown University, went on with his colleagues to win a Nobel Prize for this work. •