Liyang Chen and his collaborators at Rice University measured the current flowing through an atoms-thin strand of “strange” metal and found that it flowed smoothly and evenly:
Familiar metals like tin and mercury become superconductors only when chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero. Bednorz and Müller measured the electrical resistance in a copper-based (“cuprate”) material and saw that it vanished at a relatively balmy 35 kelvins. (For their breakthrough discovery, Bednorz and Müller pocketed a Nobel Prize just a year later.)
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The cuprates got really weird when they stopped superconducting and started resisting. As all metals warm, resistance increases. Warmer temperatures mean atoms and electrons jiggle more, creating more resistance-inducing collisions as electrons shuttle current through a material. In normal metals, such as nickel, resistance rises quadratically at low temperatures — slowly at first and then faster and faster. But in the cuprates, it rose linearly: Each degree of warming brought the same increase in resistance — a bizarre pattern that continued over hundreds of degrees and, in terms of strangeness, overshadowed the material’s superconducting ability. The cuprates were the strangest metals researchers had ever seen.
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The current in the gold wire crackled in the familiar way that currents made of charged quasiparticles do — like fat raindrops splattering on the car roof. But in the strange metal, current slipped quietly through the nanowire, an effect akin to the nearly silent hiss of mist. The most straightforward interpretation of the experiment is that charge in this strange metal does not flow in electron-size chunks.
Current is not a steady flow of electrons. It’s caused by the motion of electrons, but the electrons themselves don’t actually have to move all that much.
“The test didn’t fit the model, so reality must be wrong.”
Someday we’ll find that LK-99 really did superconduct.