Below their critical temperature they conduct the electrical current without resistance and thus extremely efficiently: Until now it has only been known that high-temperature superconductors work – but not how. Physicists at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) have succeeded in tracking the redistribution of the energy in the material. To do this they used a medium which is itself fast enough to register these processes — light. The "Nature Communications" journal has just published their results.

Transmitting huge volumes of data and even moving matter using light: these are two of the visions that physicists working in the field of plasmonics have for the future. In a collaboration with colleagues from Haifa (Israel), Kaiserslautern and Stuttgart, Scientists at the Center for Nanointegration (CENIDE) at the University of Duisburg-Essen succeeded in producing nanometer-sized plasmon swirls on a metal surface, filming the cycles at 100 attosecond intervals.