Physicists Are Struggling to Explain a Phenomenon That Should Be Impossible
If you want a quick way to start an argument in a physics department, bring up this sentence: superconductivity and magnetism are supposed to hate each other.
That “supposed to” is doing a lot of work right now.
In 2025, multiple experiments pushed a long-standing rule of thumb to the edge: researchers reported materials where superconductivity (electric current with zero resistance) appears alongside magnetic behavior that should normally tear superconductivity apart. One MIT team flat-out described the result as something that clashes with the usual intuition—because in the standard picture, magnetism breaks the delicate electron pairing that makes superconductors superconduct. MIT News+1
And then, on December 22, 2025, MIT theorists published an explanation that’s equal parts elegant and unsettling: the current might not be carried by ordinary electrons at all, but by strange “fractional” stand-ins called anyons—quasiparticles that behave unlike anything in everyday 3D materials. MIT News
The rule everyone learns: magnets wreck superconductors
Superconductivity is often taught with a clean mental image: electrons pair up into “Cooper pairs,” and those pairs glide through a material without scattering—no friction, no wasted energy, no heat. Magnetism, however, introduces internal fields and spin effects that usually disrupt those pairs.
That’s why the classic expectation has been: you can have superconductivity, or you can have magnetism, but you don’t get to have both—at least not in a straightforward, stable way. MIT’s May 2025 report put it bluntly: magnets and superconductors were assumed to mix like oil and water. MIT News
The first shock: a “magnetic superconductor” in graphite
Incident date: May 22, 2025 (paper reported as appearing that day) MIT News
MIT researchers studying a special stacking of graphene layers—rhombohedral graphene, found inside ordinary graphite—reported signs of an exotic state: a superconductor that could be switched between two superconducting “orientations” in a way that looked uncannily magnetic. In a conventional superconductor, you’d expect superconductivity to weaken and die as magnetic field strength rises. Instead, their measurements suggested the system was flipping between two superconducting states, like a magnet flipping its polarity. MIT News
The team connected this to chirality—a kind of handedness in how the paired electrons move—hinting at “chiral superconductivity.” In plain English: the superconducting pairs may collectively swirl in a way that creates internal magnetic-like behavior, rather than being destroyed by it.