Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory
The formation of Cooper pairs, bound electron pairs (yellow shaded blue spheres with arrows to indicate spin direction), in some superconductors is generated by magnetic interactions of loosely bound electrons with electrons that are much more strongly bound to their parent atom (black spheres in the atomic plane with spins of neighboring electrons pointing in the opposite direction). Scientists demonstrated that a certain superconductor is the poster child for this long sought pairing mechanism of unconventional superconductivity, where a material can conduct electricity with no resistance to increase efficiency.