Ritu Gupta

A superconductor is a material that, when strongly cooled, loses its electrical resistance: current flows through it without losses. Scientists took a layered crystal of PdTe2, similar to a stack of sheets of paper, and cooled it to temperatures below 1.8 kelvin (that's about -271°C).

A translator gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. That's roughly how disorder in a crystal slows electrons: tiny inhomogeneities make them wander, and resistance grows. In the Dirac semimetal PdTe, this effect has now been observed in its pure form for the first time.