How quantum physics may save Earth from global warming

Transporting renewable energy to where it’s needed lies at the heart of the human endeavour to get rid of the need for fossil fuels. Superconductors can do so without loosing any of the precious electricity on the way, seemingly defying physical intuition. Find out in this article why many body physics is needed to understand their counter-intuitive behaviour, what role quantum entanglement plays and how quantum computation might lead to the discovery of materials which may give us the tools for a greener future.
One of the oldest still existing rainforest in the world — Daintree at Cape Tribulation in Australia. It was the enourmous plant material produced in the forests of the Carbon age which got compressed to coal and oil
in the depths of the earth — and it is forests like this which are now endangered by global warming.

Dealing with climate change and the shortening fossil resources of our planet is one of the most pressing problems of our generation. Physically, both issues arise from the fact that fossil fuels are incredibly convenient for solving the two most important human tasks: Producing energy and transporting it to where it’s needed. With oil, the former task has been done by nature in the last couple of million years. We just have to pump the ready-made product out of the earth. Transportation is also easy due to its incredible energy density. Just 50kg of oil can carry a car weighing 2 metric tonnes for a thousand kilometres!
Where once was a mountain is now a hole — an iron ore mine in Western Australia.

The curse of Ohm

At first sight, both problems are not that hard to solve. We know how to harvest the sun’s energy with solar panels, so why don’t we just put a lot of them in the deserts of the earth and then transport the electricity to cities with long cables? The main reason is probably of political nature (deserts close to Europe for example have been war zones recently), but there is also a physical aspect: With current technology, transporting energy comes with a price in the form of Ohm’s law, which holds in all normal metals like copper and iron which we use to transport electricity.

Heat loss is proportional to the square of the electric current — this is why high power lines operate at high voltage, therefore reducing the current.

High voltage power lines. The technique currently in place requires at least four independent cables spatially separated from each other: three lines carrying the A/C current and one ground line.
Photo by Manprit Kalsi on Unsplash

Enter Superconductors

But there actually are materials with which you can transport the same amount of electricity as those huge masts in a single cable of just a few cms diameter under any old road! In superconductors, Ohm’s curse doesn’t hold and so they can conduct electricity without any energy loss (and with that I literally mean zero loss). How is that possible you may ask? Doesn’t this sound like a perpetuum mobile, something like a car that keeps on rolling when you just set it moving once?

Electron couple dance

How does this happen exactly and why does this lead to frictionless flow of electricity? While the exact explanation of this is quite involved and resulted in multiple (!) nobel prizes being awarded to the theory’s discoverers, I want to give a simple picture of analogy here. In a normal conductor, electrons are lone wolfs, they fight themselves through the mace of atoms and get pushed around by them, loosing energy to the crystal lattice every time they bump into something.


A Bose Einstein Condensate of Cooper pairs flows through a wire without any friction — a superconductor is born.

Can this even be used?

Yes and it already is! Ever seen those high-speed Maglev trains in Japan? They are based on yet another weird effect of superconductors: They push magnetic fields out of themselves! Maglevs are using this by levitating on superconducting magnets.

A new maglev train of the Shinkansen lines in Japan. They levitate on superconducting magnets and allow to reduce friction to just the one coming from the air. Taken from wikipedia.


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