Quantum levitation

We’ve all seen the demonstration of the Meissner effect in which a magnet is made to seemingly “hover” above a superconductor. If you haven’t I blogged about it a while back, March 2007 to be precise. Last week, a new video emerged that shows the Meissner effect in action, but this time highlighting the quantum locking of channels of magnetic field that get trapped within the chilly superconductor. The effect is very nice:

The hovering puck is a crystal sapphire wafer 500 micrometres thick coated in a yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) ceramic and colled to 185 Celsius to make it superconducting. Team leader Guy Deutscher of Tel Aviv University uses it to demonstrated “quantum trapping” and “quantum levitation” at recent ATSC event in Baltimore. He told The Guardian that there are yet unlikely to be any application for this discovery, despite the obvious sci-fi potential of a Marty MFly hoverboard or Luke Skywalker hovercar…