Superconductors can conduct electricity without any resistance or power loss and can effortlessly cause magnets to levitate above them. These properties would make superconductors useful for high-speed trains or long-distance power transmission in theory, but they only work at extreme low temperatures - more than one hundred degrees below zero.
This requirement makes building a hyper-efficient electrical grid or high-speed rail network very expensive. Researchers from the University of Houston, Adelwitz Technologiezentrum and the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research believe that a network that accomplishes both tasks at the same time would be much more affordable.
Most magnetic-levitation (maglev) designs feature the superconductor inside the vehicle, which is itself suspended above a magnetic track. The authors decided to flip this arrangement upside-down, putting the superconductor on the ground and giving each vehicle a magnet....