Why did it just… stop?

• Researchers just witnessed a superconductor behavior that defies our current understanding of physics.
• At a certain electron density, quantum fluctuations—the phenomena that make superconductors stop being superconductors—just… stop.
• The team behind this discovery has no idea why it happens, but looks forward to finding new physics to explain their discovery.

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When ice melts into water, it changes. It behaves differently, it moves differently, and the atoms are organized differently. These are all effects of a phase change, and while they don’t change what a material is, they can definitely change how it works.

The same thing—or at least a similar thing—happens in the quantum realm, and these quantum phase changes are extremely interested to researchers studying superconductors. “How a superconducting phase can be changed to another phase is an intriguing area of study,” Sanfeng Wu, who studies these transitions, said in a press release. “And we have been interested in this problem in atomically thin, clean, and single crystalline materials for a while.”

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In order to turn that interest into more scientific knowledge, as the research team describes in a study recently published in the journal Nature Physics, they turned to a material known as tungsten ditelluride and shaved it down until it was just three atoms thick. Then, they made it cold. Really cold. -459.58 F° cold.