Current limits to wire technology

High-temperature superconductors could be a boon to the power industry, carrying large currents with virtually no energy loss. Unfortunately, these brittle materials are difficult to make into wires, so in practice they are powdered and encased in silver strips, and drawn out to align the powder crystallites. But the current capacity of these tapes is still severely limited. That is probably due to misalignment of the crystallites, according to new magnet-optical imaging studies. So for commercial applications, slightly different processing strategies may be needed — or an entirely different type of tape.