THE material that revolutionised electronics has been endowed with even greater power: silicon has joined the ranks of the superconductors.
In theory, doping silicon with high enough levels of boron atoms should turn it into a superconductor, but getting enough boron into the silicon has been a problem. Now Etienne Bustarret at the French national research agency CNRS in Grenoble and his colleagues have cracked it.
They fired a laser pulse at a silicon wafer while passing boron chloride gas over it. The laser melted the silicon, allowing many more boron atoms than normal to enter. When the silicon solidified,…
