By Selvyn Skandakumar

Using electronics these days can be quite arduous. You will find yourself enjoying using your surface until it heats like an oven to the point where it burns to the touch. This is due to resistance. When you keep your surface on for long, you have electricity (electrons) flowing through the internal components of the surface. However, each component and wire within the surface has a resistance in the form of positive ions. Here is where the “heating effect” caused by resistance comes in, when electrons collide with positive ions (which is the resistance) within the wire and components the collisions cause heat. These collisions have two main impacts on the device. Firstly, the collisions generate heat causing the body of the surface to heat up. Secondly, these collisions causes energy loss within the circuit, which can be seen as the surface losing charge.

This is where superconductors come in. With the issue that arises from the “heating effect” causing surfaces that heat up to the temperature of the Sun after a few minutes of usage and most portable devices losing all their battery before you can even blink, superconductors may potentially be the solution.

Superconductors are special materials that conduct electricity without resistance meaning that they don’t heat up when electricity runs through it. Although at a first glance this technology may seem revolutionary, there are severe downsides. The Superconductor possesses this special property only until a certain temperature. Once the temperature is reached, the superconductor material begins to operate like a normal material, the superconductor abides by the laws of the heating effect. The biggest downside to superconductors is that the threshold where the superconductor begins to operate like a normal material is extremely low. In fact, the threshold is so low that the highest official temperature recorded with room pressure, where the superconductor operates without resistance, is -135 degrees Celsius. However, there is a way to increase these low temperatures. By increasing pressure, you can increase the temperature that the superconductor can withstand before operating normally. Researchers in China claim to have made an alloy that, at pressures of 250-260 GPa, can withstand a temperature of 24 degrees Celsius before going to a normal state. Although this may seem revolutionary, the pressure makes the superconductor impossible to utilise in normal day to day technology. Due to the conditions required to generate the pressure.  

I still believe there is a great future for superconductors. As superconductors are made by putting together many different compounds and making an alloy with special superconductivity properties, I believe one day we will find an alloy that can operate as a superconductor at room temperature and room pressure. Ultimately, this would revolutionise technology as we know it.