This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers at the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), a center within Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), discovered that atomic-scale steps can guide superconducting vortices in an ultrathin superconductor. Vortices moved more than 1,000 times as easily along the steps as across them, and this guiding effect could be tuned by temperature and magnetic field.
Superconducting vortices are tiny quantum objects whose movement can strongly influence how superconductors behave. Controlling their direction of motion could therefore be important for developing ultralow-power superconducting technologies. However, directional control of vortices in two-dimensional superconductors has remained challenging.
Achieving such control could help develop future superconducting devices that consume less power while improving processing efficiency. To address this challenge, a research team led by Takashi Uchihashi of the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) at the National Institute for Materials Science investigated an ultrathin superconductor with regularly arranged atomic steps on its surface. Scanning tunneling microscopy confirmed the parallel steps and directly visualized vortices located along them.
Their findings were published in the journal Physical Review B on July 30, 2026. Four-terminal resistance measurements revealed that vortices moved more than 1,000 times as easily along the atomic steps as across them at intermediate magnetic fields. "Our study shows that atomic-scale steps can act as effective rails that guide superconducting vortices, and that this guiding effect can be tuned simply by changing the temperature or magnetic field," said Uchihashi.
Between about 0.10 and 0.20 T, vortices flowed freely along the steps without being hindered by pinning, forming one-dimensional pinning-free vortex flow. At the lowest temperatures, their motion was governed by quantum tunneling. Overall, the findings demonstrate that one-atom-high surface steps can act as effective rails for guiding quantum vortices, opening possibilities for controlling vortex motion and heat flow in future superconducting technologies.
Wenxuan Qian et al, Anisotropic transport of Josephson vortices in atomic-layer superconductors on vicinal surfaces, Physical Review B (2026). On arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2608.01196 Journal information: Physical Review B , arXiv Provided by National Institute for Materials Science Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.
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