Researchers believe they can fit 25 million Josephson junctions — a useful component for quantum computing — on one two-inch wafer with this approach.

In today’s digital age, silicon is king. But as with other semiconductors that are widely used in the industry, trace quantities of other elements are often added to silicon to influence its electronic behaviour, a process known as doping.

Now, scientists have taken doping to a new level, replacing one in every eight atoms in germanium — a semiconductor similar to silicon – with the superconductor gallium, so that the material forms a new superconductor that can be used for technologies like quantum computing and sensing.

Although silicon is next in line for this approach, germanium is already widely used in industry and is extremely compatible with silicon. The researchers outlined their approach in a new study published Oct. 30 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"I think there is a lot of good reasons to be excited about this," co-author of the study Javad Shabani, a professor of physics at New York University, told Live Science.

The idea of doping a semiconductor enough to render it superconducting was first proposed in 1964 by Marvin Cohen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, then at the University of Chicago. The idea was resuscitated in the 2000s and 2010s, when several groups attempted to bombard silicon and germanium with superconducting metals to see if they could achieve the theoretically predicted new phase — but they hit problems.

"When you bombard, you kind of ruin the lattice," Shabani explained, adding that you then need to heat it up and "anneal" it to run further experiments for superconducting behaviour, so it is not clear whether dopant atoms have simply formed an island of superconducting material, or whether a new superconducting phase has formed in the bombarded element. He and his team even tried the experiments themselves. "We just added to the puzzle," he told Live Science.