Researchers at the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), a center within Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), discovered that atomic-scale steps can guide superconducting vortices in an ultrathin superconductor.

Vortices moved more than 1,000 times as easily along the steps as across them, and this guiding effect could be tuned by temperature and magnetic field.

Superconducting vortices are tiny quantum objects whose movement can strongly influence how superconductors behave. Controlling their direction of motion could therefore be important for developing ultralow-power superconducting technologies.