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Supercurrents Flex Cantilever to Reveal Vortices

A soft cantilever beam, which can detect a very weak force, has been used by IRG1 researchers to uncover a striking property of cuprate superconductors: that trace supercurrents surrounding magnetic flux vortices persist for tens of degrees above the superconducting transition temperature Tc. The field needed to unbind these paired electrons is 60-100 times stronger than that inside a clinical MRI machine.