Rasmus Bjørk

A thin film of metal oxide lies on a surface with a tiny pit. If you gently compress the film from the sides, it won't crumple — instead, it will bow downward into the pit or bulge upward like a hump. Both positions are stable, like a canning jar lid that is either concave or convex and doesn't flip back and forth on its own.

A superconductor is like an orchestra that plays without a single wrong note, until the conductor turns a tuning knob. In this new work, that knob turned out to be the magnetic history of nickel contacts.