By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

The utilization of superconductive materials offers the possibility for significant technological advancement if the phenomenon can be harnessed in a cost-effective manner. The problem: most materials only enter the superconductive state under ultra-low temperatures or ultra-high pressures (see Dr. Ines Urdaneta’s RSF article on superconductivity at high pressures). Maintaining such environmental conditions are an engineering challenge and are cost-prohibitive for applications in personal-use technologies, like ultra-fast home computers and communications devices, or public infrastructure like mag-lev transit and electrical transmission (greatly reducing wasted energy and hence energy usage while simultaneously increasing feasibility of nearly perfectly efficient energy distribution).

For superconductivity to move beyond niche applications a room-temperature superconductor is required, and the quest to...