With all the rage on superconductors zipping through the news (looking at you, LK-99), it's sometimes easy to let other stories fly under the radar. But science happens everywhere, all the time: now, a research team with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a superconducting device that they say will bring improved energy and thermal efficiency to electronics. Their work was published in an online issue of Physical Review Letters.
Like LK-99 (which is still going through a messy replication and peer-review process), the MIT-designed diode (a kind of switching device) is still in its design infancy. Yet even so, Jagadeesh Moodera (lead author) et al. say this diode is already twice as efficient as previous diode architectures when it comes to carrying current (and preventing losses), with ample design room left to improve its characteristics.
