By Peter Weiss
Researchers studying the crystalline structure of radioactive plutonium have happened onto the first plutonium-based superconductor. Like other superconductors, this one carries electricity with zero resistance, but it doesn’t fit neatly into any known family of superconducting substances.
Plutonium, the explosive heart of most nuclear weapons, is too radioactive and toxic for the find to lead to any practical applications. But the puzzling new alloy is opening a route to studying some poorly understood aspects of superconductivity, says John L. Sarrao of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, who led the experiment.