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The insight is an important step toward understanding how superconductors work, and it could help researchers design even better materials. High-temperature superconductors could lead to cheaper MRI machines; smaller, lighter power cables; and far more energy-efficient and secure power grids. Utilities, for example, could use superconducting magnets to store energy at night, and then use it at peak demand hours in the mornings and evenings.

Superconducting materials conduct electric current without any losses when they are chilled below a certain temperature, called the critical temperature. Niobium alloys, used to make superconducting magnets for MRI machines, are superconducting only below 10 K. Copper-oxygen compounds, or cuprates, which were discovered in the late 1980s, are superconducting at much higher temperatures of 90 to 138 K. At these temperatures, cheap, easy-to-use liquid nitrogen can be employed as a refrigerant. (Cuprates are not used for MRI magnets because it is difficult and expensive to make wires from them.) And some manufacturers are making nitrogen-cooled superconducting cables for transmission lines.

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