Out of the loop

Note: I might be confusing some of this with semiconductors, it's been a while since I learned about them.

Superconductors are used in computing. Specifically, the property of a superconductor is that the material offers no electrical resistance, and it expels magnetic fields around them. That last part is known as the Meissner Effect.

The fundamentals of modern computers rely on electricity. When an electrical current is running, it creates an electromagnetic field around the circuit. This can affect other nearby circuits. Have you ever had a set of headphones that also picked up the microphone when it shouldn't? This can be because two circuits are interfering with each other. This property also spurs innovation in transferring data, and shapes how we build things like ethernet cables to be resistant to outside interference.

Superconductors are appearing in the news because in some labs they've seen superconducting properties in materials that exist at room temperature. Before now, we've seen superconductors operating only at extremely low temperatures like 10K, aka 10C over absolute zero. That's friggin' chilly.

Quantum Computer Scientists use superconductors to make their computers run. It's not really my field, but as I understand it you need to keep the computer very cold while it runs, and even then it won't run for very long before heating up. My understanding of the state of the technology is that for this reason quantum computers are incredibly expensive and only last for a few seconds or minutes. A room temperature superconductor has the potential to change that.

Sometime in... I want to say the 1980's, we reached a point where we couldn't build computer processors that run faster than they do now. If we tried to make them run faster, they'd begin to heat up and melt. So we started working on making processors behave more efficiently. A potential use case for a superconductor would be in resuming the work on making processors run faster. If we can keep our existing methods of making more efficient processors and combine them with inherently faster technologies, it could mean big things in the world of computing.

We've only seen some preliminary results in labs, so I'm not sure people should be getting too over it yet. But it's an exciting development in the world of circuitry.