It should be possible to achieve stable superconductivity at higher temperatures by restricting electrons to two dimensions in space, University of Arizona physicist Andrei Lebed has shown.

Electrons will become completely two-dimensional within laboratory-produced magnetic fields that are between 200,000 times and a million times stronger (10 to 50 Tesla) than the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth, Lebed said.

In research published in the Dec. 9 Physical Review Letters, he says it is also theoretically possible to restrict standing electron waves to a single molecule.

More practical, affordable (higher-temperature) superconductors would be a boon to power utilities that would realize enormous savings in more efficient systems for generating and storing electricity, to the transportation industry which is experimenting with trains that float above their tracks using superconducting magnets, to medical technologists who are developing improved magnetic resonance imaging, and to the supercomputing industry that seeks very fast electronic switches needed to build petaflop computers capable of performing a thousand-trillion floating point operations per second.

Source: University of Arizona news release