Armed with just the right atomic arrangements, superconductors allow
electricity to flow without loss and radically enhance energy
generation, delivery, and storage.
Scientists tweak these superconductor
recipes by swapping out elements or manipulating the valence electrons
in an atom's outermost orbital shell to strike the perfect conductive
balance.
Most high-temperature superconductors contain atoms with only
one orbital impacting performance—but what about mixing those elements
with more complex configurations?
Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National
Laboratory have combined atoms with multiple orbitals and precisely
pinned down their electron distributions.
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| These images show the distribution of the valence electrons in the samples explored by the Brookhaven Lab collaboration—both feature a central iron layer sandwiched between arsenic atoms. The tiny red clouds (more electrons) in the undoped sample on the left (BaFe2As2) reveal the weak charge quadrupole of the iron atom, while the blue clouds (fewer electrons) around the outer arsenic ions show weak polarization. The superconducting sample on the right (doped with cobalt atoms), however, exhibits a strong quadrupole in the center and the pronounced polarization of the arsenic atoms, as evidenced by the large, red balloons. Credit: Brookhaven Lab scientists and study coauthors Lijun Wu, Yimei Zhu, Chris Homes, and Weiguo Yin |
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