My name is Andreas Buchheit.

I generalized a 300-year-old formula and unveiled new phases in exotic superconductors using

high-performance computers.

Hello Andreas, thank you for coming to Allangen.

Sure, it's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me here.

Okay, so can you tell us a little bit about your research?

Sure, so I'm an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist from Saarland University.

And what we're doing is we are developing new mathematical methods and we use them to

solve with them open problems in physics that are of relevance.

What kind of physics are we talking about?

So for instance, one thing we are looking at at the moment is how we can simulate large

numbers of particles that are interacting over large distances with each other.

That's super important in a lot of physical systems, for instance when you want to understand

how materials behave.

Can you be a little bit more specific about what kind of materials you're studying?

One material that we are very interested in are superconductors.

Okay, so what's a superconductor?

Well imagine you have a wire made out of metal and you put a current through it, right?

What happens is the wire becomes warm and at some point if you put the voltage down,

the current dies down.

So what happens is you have energy and this energy dissipates into heat and gets lost.

Superconductors, they have the property to have zero electric resistance and that means

you can transport energy over arbitrary distances and there's no energy loss.

There are super many applications.

For instance, imagine you want to transport energy from the North Sea down to Bavaria.

Okay, but superconductors exist, right?

So why are we not doing that right now?

Well superconductors, they are known for more than 100 years.

Actually in 1911, Mr. Onnes discovered that if you cool down mercury to almost zero, then

it becomes superconducting, suddenly zero resistance.

But that's also the big problem.

You need to cool down these materials to very, very low temperatures such that they become

superconducting and that stops them from starting a technological revolution because you always

need an expensive cooling system.

Last year I remember there was some fuss in the media about superconductors and possible,

a new possible breakthrough.

So what was that all about?

Yeah, so one big goal of all of condensed metaphysics is to find a superconductor that

does not have this restriction that you need to cool it down a lot.

And if you would have such a room temperature superconductor, let's say that works just

here in this very room, then you could have such important technological applications.

Imagine not only energy transport to be very, very cheap.

You can imagine Mach-Lev trains that are operating with superconductors that can create very

strong magnetic fields.

Or if you look in medicine, there is magnetic resonance tomography.

If you have ever done that, the device is really large because there's such a big cooling

system involved.

If you take the cooling away, you could have a handheld device pretty much.

In Korea, they claimed in summer 2023 that they had found such a room temperature superconductor.