Superconductors can make electronic devices hundreds of times faster, and completely eliminate energy loss, but they've only been useful for certain applications, since it's been impossible to prevent them from conducting in all directions without the use of magnetic fields. Building computers without being able to control the direction of flow? Not possible. So, we're stuck with semiconductors, and Moore's Law is starting to bump into their limits.

Hence the magnitude of this discovery. Associate professor Mazhar Ali and a team at TU Delft have published new research in the journal Nature that opens the door to superconducting diodes and portends nothing less than revolutionary change in the speed and energy efficiency of electronics.

Where semiconductors can have a built-in fixed dipole, effectively making it harder for electrons to travel one way than the other, superconductors have no such built-in potential, so it's only been possible to induce one using a magnetic field. That's an extremely difficult thing to keep control of at the nanoscale level, so it's not practical for electronics.

To break through this limitation, Ali and the team had to bring in a novel quantum material under development by a materials physics team at Johns Hopkins University. Like graphene, Nb3Br8 is a 2D material used in atomically thin slices, but it had been theorized to host its own electric dipole.