You may ask, what is superconductivity and how does it work? First, we have to understand how a copper wire works. When you plug in a vacuum, it creates a circuit, which induces electrons to travel through. However, if you ever kept anything plugged in for a while, you would notice that the wire gets hot. That is because there is random movement in the system. When the electrons travel through the wire, they will bump and collide with other atoms because of the random movements due to heat. This in turn will heat the wire even more and more, which will cause even more loss of electricity to heat.

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The solution? Cool it down. It was discovered that if you cool down a system with liquid nitrogen, the wire would hit a critical point where there was no electrical resistance at all. Many different compounds have different points, but they are all extremely cold. (In the -400℉ range) Scientists would power a closed circuit, cool it down below the critical point, and then leave it be without the power source. They would come back several years later and notice that the circuit lost no measurable power, thus deducing that once the circuit hit the critical point, there is absolutely no electrical resistance, or resistance so infinitesimally small that it shouldn’t be considered.

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The is a unique property between the electrons that form a bond extremely weak that would have been broken by the random movement of atoms in a regular heated wire. This bond is called a Cooper pair, and it links two electrons together. The electron, a negatively charged subatomic particle, would create a disturbance as the positive atoms of the wire lost their electrons due to conduction. The new clumping of positively charged atoms would make electrons attracted to the area. While the electrons are of similar charge, the distance between the two would be between hundreds to thousands of atoms, a big enough distance to not be affected. Now, these electrons are bound together, traveling through the wire, otherwise known as a Cooper pair. 

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