14 DAY TRIAL // The idea that electric “continuous currents” flowed inside small metal rings indefinitely was proposed since the earliest days of quantum physics, in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was stated that the currents were small, but that they flowed through the rings indefinitely, regardless of whether or not voltage was applied to them. Now, scientists at the Yale University and the Freie Universitat Berlin, in Germany, have managed to prove for the first time that this is true, AlphaGalileo reports.
The new investigation, in addition to proving that the currents are, indeed, real, also manages to map out their properties, and to determine that real-life traits are remarkably similar to the ones proposed theoretically. Details of the amazing study appear in the latest issue of the top journal Science. The thing that amazes scientists the most about the existence of these electric currents is the fact that they persist in average, non-superconducting materials.
The thing is that in regular metals, electrons making up the currents meet resistance, which means that they can only flow with applied voltage. The continuous currents are, apparently, invulnerable to the effects of this resistance force, and can flow indefinitely through conventional metallic compounds. The science team says that the quantum effect that allows for this type of behavior to take place can be likened to the one that keeps electrons spinning around atomic nuclei.
The reason why this electron behavior was not observed before is the fact that conventional measuring devices do not work on them. Additionally, the currents only appear in metallic rings that are less than one micron in diameter, about 100th the width of a human hair. The most comprehensive theoretical predictions about the properties of continuous electrical currents were written down some 15 years ago, in the doctoral thesis of Felix von Oppen, who is currently a researcher at the Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems, at Freie Universitat Berlin.