{"id":4083,"date":"2026-10-11T19:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T17:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websrv.saske.sk\/uef\/en\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2026-10-13T09:51:59","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T07:51:59","slug":"vivat-scientia-from-absolute-zero-to-levitation-secrets-of-superconductivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websrv.saske.sk\/uef\/en\/vivat-scientia-from-absolute-zero-to-levitation-secrets-of-superconductivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Vivat Scientia! From Absolute zero to levitation: secrets of superconductivity"},"content":{"rendered":"

What happens to matter when we cool it to the limit of what is possible? What does the world look like at temperatures close to absolute zero, and why can Ko\u0161ice be sometimes considered as one of the coldest places in the universe? The popular science lecture From Absolute Zero to Levitation: The Secrets of Superconductivity<\/em>, held after the summer break on September 30, 2026, at the P\u00fachov Theatre as part of the Vivat Scientia! Long Live Science! series, offered answers to these questions and more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jozef Ka\u010dmar\u010d\u00edk from the Institute of Experimental Physics SAS took the audience into the world of extremely low temperatures – the journey ran from temperatures familiar from natural environments in various places on our planet, through conditions in space, to temperatures reached in laboratories. While nature in space can reach temperatures of about one kelvin above absolute zero, physicists in Ko\u0161ice laboratories manage to cool their environment to approximately 50 microkelvin above absolute zero.<\/p>\n

The lecture also covered the history of reaching record-low temperatures – from the attempts to liquefy gases at the beginning of the 20th century to the liquefaction of helium, achieved in 1908 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. His further experiments led to the discovery of superconductivity a few years later.<\/p>\n

The audience learned what happens to materials as they are cooled. As temperature falls, the atoms in the crystal lattice move less, and electrons can pass through the material with less resistance. However in 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes observed something entirely unexpected with Mercury: at a critical temperature, its electrical resistance suddenly dropped to zero. Superconductivity had appeared.<\/p>\n

One of the most impressive moments of the lecture were the practical demonstrations of superconductivity. A cooled superconductor placed above a magnetic track lifted off and began to levitate above it. Visitors could see with their own eyes a phenomenon linked to one of the characteristic properties of superconductors: their behavior in a magnetic field.<\/p>\n

Superconductivity is not just an interesting physical phenomenon demonstrated, for example, by magnetic levitation under laboratory conditions. It also has significant practical uses. One of them is magnetic levitation technology, such as SCMaglev trains, which use superconducting magnets to levitate and move above the track, allowing them to reach very high speeds. Superconducting magnets also play an important role in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where they create the strong magnetic fields needed to steer beams of charged particles.<\/p>\n

The lecture thus showed that the journey toward absolute zero is not only a search for the lowest possible temperature. It is also a journey toward discovering properties of matter that we do not observe under ordinary conditions, yet which are key to the future of science and technological development in many fields. From zero electrical resistance to magnetic levitation, superconductivity opens the door to technologies that were considered science fiction until recently.<\/p>\n

Text: Lenka Ula\u0161inov\u00e1 Bystrianska<\/p>\n

Original text HERE<\/a><\/p>\n

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