Supercomputers without waste heat
Generally speaking, magnetism and the lossless flow of electrical current ("superconductivity") are competing phenomena that cannot coexist in the same sample. However, for building supercomputers, synergetically combining both states comes with major advantages as compared to today's semiconductor technology, characterized by high power consumption and heat production. Researchers from the Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz have now demonstrated that the lossless electrical transfer of magnetically encoded information is possible. This finding enables enhanced storage density on integrated circuit chips and significantly reduces the energy consumption of computing centres. The results of this study have been published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications.