Superconductors, already common in MRI machines in hospitals throughout the country, could be used for much more (such as saving energy in transmitting electricity from a power station to your house) if they would operate at even higher temperatures. Physicists don't know how to accomplish this, because we don’t understand much about how high-temperature superconductors work.
We can't even use our most powerful supercomputers to simulate these materials—right now we can only calculate the behavior of about 10 electrons, compared to the millions of billions of billions of electrons in a superconducting wire. Every 10 years, advancements in the speed of computers let us add only one electron to a computer simulation. We're trying to shed light on these materials in our lab using a very different approach called quantum simulation.