Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have observed a rare superconductivity in three-layer graphene. In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers report that the material shows superconductivity in high magnetic fields of up to 10 tesla, which is three times higher than the expected endurance of a traditional superconductor.

The results strongly suggest that the three-layer graphene originally discovered by the same team is a very rare type of superconductor, known as the "Spin Tristate," which is not affected by strong magnetic fields. Such exotic superconductors could vastly improve technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses superconducting wires to resonate and image biological tissue in a magnetic field. MRI machines currently only work in the magnetic field range of one to three teslas. If it could be made using Spin Tristate superconductors, MRI could operate at higher magnetic fields, producing sharper, deeper images of the human body.

New evidence of the Spin Tristate superconductivity in three-layer graphene could also help scientists design stronger superconductors for practical quantum computing.