John Martinis

Now, just to give you an analogy of how it works.

It's not a perfect analogy.

It's a close analogy.

If you have a normal metal, any metal we have at room temperature, it's like a gas of electrons.

It's like, you know, gas in the air.

And then when you get below the superconducting temperature level,

That's right.

They're different energies, different states.

You know, there's some Fermi statistics that go into that, but it's more or less looks like a gas.

You think of a gas.

And then when you cool it below a certain temperature, it then coalesces into, let's say, a solid like atoms will.

And the electrons coalesce into something, a Cooper-Pair BCS condensate, that's the name, where all the electrons are kind of locked together and doing the same thing.

Now, the nice thing about that, it's not like they're frozen in place, but they have a free parameter that allows them, all the currents, all the electrons, to flow in some direction, which is the supercurrent.

But they're moving together like they're in, like in my analogy, like they're in a solid instead of the gas.

And because they're moving together, okay, then when you work through all the physics, they are not, you know, they aren't randomly scattering off things.

They're just moving together.

And then you get a supercurrent.

Where, for example, if you made a ring a superconductor, that current would basically flow forever around the ring.

This is what you saw with the floating magnet.

Yeah, and people actually do use big superconducting magnets to store energy.