Superconductivity and magnetism have long been treated as rivals in condensed matter physics, one thriving on perfect electrical order, the other on internal magnetic chaos. Now researchers at MIT report that the two can inhabit the same crystal at the same time, revealing a magnetic superconductor that upends decades of textbook assumptions and opens a new frontier for quantum materials.
By probing ordinary graphite, the same carbon form used in pencil lead, the team has uncovered a phase in which electrical current flows without resistance while the material simultaneously behaves like a magnet. The finding suggests that devices once thought impossible, from ultra-compact quantum circuits to radically efficient power components, may be engineered from a substance that until now seemed almost mundane.
Why superconductors and magnets were never supposed to mix
For more than half a century, the standard picture of superconductivity has rested on the idea that fragile electron pairs glide through a crystal only when magnetic disturbances are kept at bay. In conventional superconductors, even modest magnetic fields can tear apart these pairs, destroying the zero-resistance state and turning the material back into an ordinary conductor. That is why the magnets used to steer particle beams or power MRI scanners are carefully designed so that the superconducting coils are shielded from stray internal magnetism, and why physicists have treated intrinsic magnetism as a kind of poison for superconducting order.
Magnetism, by contrast, thrives on electrons aligning their spins, creating internal fields that jostle and scatter charge carriers. In a typical ferromagnet, the same alignment that lets a fridge magnet cling to steel also disrupts the delicate correlations that superconductivity needs to survive. The prevailing view has been that a crystal must choose: either it supports a robust magnetic state or it allows electrons to pair up and move without resistance, but not both. The new MIT work directly challenges that dichotomy by showing that under the right conditions, a single material can host both behaviors at once and even let them interact in unexpected ways.
MIT’s graphite surprise inside an everyday material
The most striking part of the story is the material itself. Instead of an exotic compound grown in a specialized furnace, the researchers focused on graphite, the layered carbon form that is the primary material in pencil lead. By carefully preparing thin flakes and stacking them in a particular geometry, they found that this familiar substance hides a quantum phase that had never been seen before. The team reports that the “one-of-a-kind” phenomenon was observed in ordinary graphite, revealing that a workhorse industrial material can harbor a state of matter that blends superconductivity with magnetism when it is pushed into the right structural configuration.
According to the group working within the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, the key is arranging the carbon sheets in a staircase of offset layers that subtly changes how electrons move between them. In this engineered stack, the same carbon atoms that normally just conduct electricity in a mundane way instead support a phase where current flows without resistance while the crystal also behaves like a magnet. By showing that such a phase can emerge in a system as simple as graphite, the researchers at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics have created a platform that is both conceptually clean and technologically accessible, rather than relying on rare or chemically complex compounds that are difficult to reproduce at scale.
Cooling graphite into a magnetic superconductor
To reveal this hidden phase, the MIT team had to push graphite into an extreme low temperature regime where quantum effects dominate. They report that they cooled carefully prepared flakes to 300 m, a temperature of about -273 degrees Celsius, and saw the material undergo a sharp transition into a superconducting state. At this point, electrical resistance dropped effectively to zero, signaling that electrons were pairing up and flowing coherently through the graphite stack. The fact that this transition occurred in a system built from carbon alone already set it apart from more conventional superconductors based on metals or complex oxides.
What makes the result even more unusual is that the same measurements showed clear signatures of magnetism persisting in the superconducting phase. They found that when the flakes are cooled to 300 m (about -273 degrees Celsius), the material turns into a superconductor that is also a magnet, a combination that is absent in other superconductors the group has studied. The researchers emphasize that this coexistence is not a trivial overlap of two independent effects but a tightly coupled state in which the magnetic order and the superconducting current appear to influence each other. That interplay is what elevates the graphite system from a curiosity to a potential platform for new quantum technologies.
How MIT physicists reframed a long-standing quantum puzzle
From my perspective, the most important conceptual shift in this work is not just that superconductivity and magnetism appear together, but that the MIT physicists have shown they can be engineered as two sides of the same quantum phase. Rather than treating magnetism as a nuisance to be suppressed, they designed the graphite structure so that magnetic behavior emerges from the same electrons that carry the supercurrent. In doing so, they reframed a long-standing puzzle about whether these two orders must always compete, demonstrating instead that they can be intertwined in a controllable way.
The group describes their discovery as a New Type of Superconductor that is also a Magnet, highlighting that magnets and superconductors go together in this system in a way that defies the usual antagonism. By working with graphite, they also connect the physics directly to a material that is already central to technologies built on carbon, from batteries to graphene electronics. The fact that the phenomenon arises in the same carbon form used in pencil lead underscores how much quantum richness can be hidden in apparently simple substances when they are stacked and cooled with precision by MIT Physicists Discover efforts focused on a New Type of Superconductor that is also a Magnet.
Anyons, frustration, and the deeper quantum landscape
To understand why such an unlikely coexistence might be possible, it helps to look at how modern condensed matter theory has evolved beyond the simple categories of superconductors and magnets. In many strongly interacting systems, electrons do not behave like individual particles at all, but instead form collective excitations with exotic properties. One example is anyons, quasiparticles that can carry fractional charge and obey statistics that are neither purely fermionic nor bosonic. These entities often emerge in systems where the underlying spins are frustrated, meaning they cannot all align in a way that simultaneously satisfies every interaction, which leads to highly entangled ground states.
Researchers at MIT have explored how such anyons can move without friction when they break out of their frustration, a behavior that hints at new ways to store and manipulate quantum information. In one line of work, Todadri and colleagues describe how these anyons may sit at the root of surprising quantum experiments, suggesting that the same kinds of collective excitations could be relevant in materials where superconductivity and magnetism intertwine. While the graphite superconductor is not yet explicitly framed in terms of anyons, the broader lesson from this research is that once electrons are strongly correlated, the old intuition that magnetism and superconductivity must always fight each other can fail, replaced by a richer quantum landscape where new emergent particles and phases become possible.
Direct evidence that superconductivity and magnetism can share a crystal
The graphite discovery slots into a growing body of evidence that superconductivity and magnetism can, under the right conditions, inhabit the same material. In the new MIT study, the researchers show that a supercurrent can pass through a magnetic material without being destroyed, indicating that the superconducting pairs are robust against internal magnetic fields that would normally break them apart. This is not just a subtle theoretical nuance; it is a direct experimental demonstration that the two orders can coexist in a single crystal rather than being separated into different layers or regions.
Reporting on the work emphasizes that superconductivity and magnetism can co-exist in some materials, and that the MIT study finds a way to sustain a supercurrent through a magnetic material without losing the zero-resistance property. The Brighter Side of News describes how this coexistence challenges the traditional view that magnetic fields inevitably disrupt superconducting states, instead showing that carefully engineered structures can host both behaviors at once. By establishing that a supercurrent can thread a magnetic environment in this way, the MIT team has provided a concrete platform for exploring devices that exploit both properties simultaneously, rather than treating magnetism as a problem to be engineered away.
From pencil lead to potential quantum devices
One of the most compelling aspects of the MIT result is its technological accessibility. Graphite is cheap, abundant, and already integrated into a wide range of industrial processes, from lubricants to electrodes. The fact that MIT scientists have identified a bizarre new magnetic superconductor phase in pencil lead suggests that the path from laboratory discovery to prototype device could be shorter than for more exotic materials. Instead of needing rare elements or elaborate crystal growth, engineers might be able to start from commercially available graphite and apply stacking and patterning techniques that are already familiar from graphene research.
Coverage of the work notes that MIT Discovers Magnetic Superconductor in Pencil Lead and poses the question, What is this, to underline how surprising it is to find such behavior in a substance so closely associated with everyday writing tools. By demonstrating that a carefully prepared piece of pencil lead can host a phase where superconductivity and magnetism are intertwined, the researchers have effectively turned a classroom staple into a testbed for quantum device concepts. It is not hard to imagine future experiments where thin graphite stacks are integrated into superconducting circuits, magnetic memory elements, or hybrid sensors that exploit both their zero-resistance transport and their internal magnetic order.
What comes next for magnetic superconductors
Looking ahead, I see several intertwined challenges that will determine how far this discovery can be pushed toward real-world impact. One is temperature: the graphite phase currently appears only when the flakes are cooled to 300 m, about -273 degrees Celsius, which requires sophisticated cryogenic systems. For applications beyond specialized quantum computing or fundamental physics experiments, researchers will need to either raise the operating temperature of this phase or identify related materials that show similar coexistence at more accessible conditions. That search will likely involve exploring other carbon-based systems, as well as layered compounds where the stacking geometry can be tuned with high precision.
Another frontier is control. To turn a magnetic superconductor into a useful component, engineers must be able to switch its properties on demand, for example by applying electric fields, strain, or external magnetic fields that toggle between different quantum phases. The broader work on anyons and frustrated systems at MIT, including the studies where Todadri describes how anyons can move without friction when they break out of their frustration, hints at how such control might be achieved through careful design of interactions and topology. If researchers can learn to steer the intertwined superconducting and magnetic orders in graphite with similar finesse, the material could become a cornerstone for next-generation quantum circuits that blend robust supercurrents with programmable magnetic textures.
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