Dance Your PhD 2018 WINNER - Superconductivity: The Musical!

Cooper Pairs and impurities come to life in a superconductor and dance their little particle hearts out! This video was chosen as the winner of Science Magazine’s Dance Your PhD 2018 Competition: Superconductivity is a phenomenon that occurs in certain metals at low temperatures, causing it to lose all resistance to electricity passing through it. At the microscopic level, this is caused by the metal’s electrons – which are non-interacting at high temperatures – pairing up with each other to form a bound state known as a Cooper Pair. This mini-musical tells the tale of electrons in a superconducting wire through the medium of swing dance. Through 3 acts, the electrons transition from unsociable beings to gregarious dance partners, culminating in a final showdown between the Cooper Pairs and spin impurity punks. In the first act, we are inside a superconductor above its transition t