Superconductors—materials that can carry electricity with zero resistance—are the backbone of powerful technologies such as MRI machines, particle accelerators, and the quantum devices of the future.
For decades, researchers have been searching for ways to make them more efficient, versatile, and easier to manufacture.
Now, a Cornell University team has made a major leap forward with a 3D-printing method that creates superconductors with record-breaking performance.
The breakthrough, published in Nature Communications, is the result of years of work led by Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Cornell’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Nearly a decade ago, his team showed for the first time that “soft matter”—materials like block copolymers that naturally arrange themselves into repeating nanoscale patterns—could be used to form superconductors.
By 2021, they had proven that this unconventional approach could match the performance of traditional methods.
Now they’ve gone a step further. Using a specially designed ink that combines block copolymers with inorganic nanoparticles, the researchers developed a one-step 3D-printing process that allows the material to self-assemble as it is printed.
After heat treatment, the printed structure becomes a porous crystalline superconductor.
This technique eliminates many of the complicated steps used in conventional fabrication, such as separately synthesizing porous materials, turning them into powders, and re-processing them with binders and heat.
The result is a scalable “one-pot” process that produces superconductors with structure on three levels. At the smallest scale, atoms arrange into a crystalline lattice.
At the nanoscale, the block copolymers direct the formation of mesostructured patterns. And at the largest scale, 3D printing allows the material to be shaped into coils, helices, or other complex designs for specific applications.
“This has been a long time in the making,” Wiesner said. “What this paper shows is that not only can we print these complex shapes, but the mesoscale confinement gives the materials properties that were simply not achievable before.”
The most impressive demonstration came when the team printed niobium nitride, a well-known superconducting material. The 3D-printed version displayed an upper critical magnetic field of 40 to 50 Tesla—the highest confinement-induced value ever reported for this compound.
That property is especially important for high-powered superconducting magnets, which are essential for technologies like MRI imaging.
What makes the advance even more exciting is that the team has established a direct link between the design of the block copolymers and the resulting superconducting properties.
This “map” allows researchers to predict how adjusting polymer characteristics can tune the performance of the final superconductor—something that has never been shown before.
The work was driven by graduate students Fei Yu, who developed and tested the printing inks, and Paxton Thetford, who solved key chemistry challenges, alongside contributions from colleagues in physics and materials science. Together, they demonstrated that soft matter approaches, once considered unconventional, can open doors to new classes of quantum materials.
Looking ahead, the Cornell team plans to apply the technique to other compounds such as titanium nitride, as well as to 3D architectures that are difficult to achieve with standard methods. The porous structures also create record-breaking surface areas, which could be particularly useful for quantum technologies that depend on maximizing interactions at the nanoscale.
“I’m very hopeful that as a new research direction, we’ll make it easier and easier to create superconductors with novel properties,” Wiesner said.
“Cornell is unique in bringing together chemists, physicists, and materials scientists to push this field forward. This study demonstrates just how much potential there is in soft matter approaches to quantum materials.”
