Physicists are trying to explain that although the introduction of high-temperature superconductors almost two decades ago raised hopes of the development of ultra-efficient magnetic trains and other new technologies, but this didn't exactly happen.

Peter Hirschfeld, a University of Florida professor of physics, and five other researchers for the first time, in a paper appearing in the online edition of Nature Physics, describe precisely how the atomic-level structural elements of high-temperature ceramic superconductors serve to impede electrical current.

According to the reports, their explanation for how "grain boundaries" separating rows of atoms within superconductors impede current is the first to fit a phenomenon that has helped keep the superconductors from reaching their vaunted potential - and puzzled experimental physicists for more than two decades.

"Nobody understood why it was such a strong effect, or why the current was so limited by these grain boundaries. And that is what we have explained in this paper," Hirschfeld has said.

It has also been reported that high-temperature superconducting ceramic wires are composed of rows of atoms arranged slightly askew to each other, as though one piece of graph paper had been melded atop another with the horizontal and vertical lines at less-than-perfect alignment. Lumps of electrical charge build up at the angles where the lines meet, acting like dams to interrupt the flow of electricity.

According to him, his and his colleagues'' contribution was to conceive and construct a mathematical model that fit these observations "very nicely."

Hirschfeld further said, "We abstracted a very theoretical model of a single boundary" that can be applied to all such boundaries. (With Inputs from Agencies)