A sample of the new superconductive material able to function as a transistor, the basic component needed for computing (Image: J Mannhart/Nature)

THE world’s first superconducting transistor, a long-standing goal for applied physicists, could lead to dramatically faster microchips.

Last year Andrea Caviglia and his colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland grew a single crystal containing two metal oxides, strontium titanate and lanthanum aluminate, as separate segments. At the interface of these materials, the team found a layer of free electrons called an electron gas (Science, vol 317, p 1196). At 0.3 kelvin – just above absolute …