The discovery would change the world. From power grids that never lose energy to magnetically levitating trains, finding a material that is superconductive at room temperature would bring a range of fantastical technologies to life. And it is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Although superconductors—materials that can transmit electricity with zero resistance—exist only at extremely frigid temperatures today, there is no physical reason why they cannot also work at room temperature. It could simply be that no one has stumbled upon the magical formula yet. But that might be about to change. In a study posted to the arXiv in late July, Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey, two scientists from the Indian Institute of Science, suggest a concoction of gold and silver nanoparticles achieves the Nobel Prize–worthy goal. The finding, from a reputable team, was initially met with both excitement and skepticism as physicists cautiously took a closer look. But the story has since prompted disbelief and even a little drama.
Despite physicists’ hope, those in the field know that numerous previous claims of warm superconductors have all fizzled out. So many initially worried that Thapa and Pandey’s find would turn out to be one more erroneous report—dubbed a USO or unidentified superconducting object. But that natural skepticism transformed into suspicion when Brian Skinner, a physicist at MIT, found something unnerving. In one of the paper’s figures, which shows how well the superconductor repels different magnetic fields at various temperatures, he noticed that the data for two different values of the magnetic field have the exact same pattern of noise, albeit slightly offset from each other.* Every time one pattern veers up or down, the other follows—perfectly in sync. But noise is random by definition. It should not repeat itself on separate trials done under different magnetic fields.
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