Whatever Happened to Quantum Levitation? 15 Years Later, Where Did This Technology Go?!

Why does it feel like I'm the only one who remembers this? Watch the disc. It's floating over a strip of magnets. Tip it, and it stays tipped. Flip the magnets over, and it hangs underneath. October 2011, a science-centre conference in Baltimore. A team from Tel Aviv University brought this, the organisers filmed it, and for a brief moment, the internet lost its mind.

That clip went up on October sixteenth. The oldest saved copy of quantumlevitation.com, from two days later, is one page: Monthly traffic exceeded. Fifteen years on, the clip has more than eleven million views.

I'm Nora, welcome to my cryo lab. So, whatever happened to quantum levitation? Did we get hoverboards? Floating trains? Kind of. And part of it went somewhere much cooler.

Here's the trick. The disc is sapphire, coated with a few microns of YBCO: yttrium barium copper oxide. Cool YBCO below about minus one-eighty Celsius and it superconducts: zero resistance, and it pushes magnetic field out. Liquid nitrogen is minus one ninety-six, so one cup does it.

But YBCO doesn't push all the field out. Some gets in, as thin threads called Abrikosov vortices. Each thread carries exactly one quantum of magnetic flux. That's the quantum in quantum levitation.

The threads get stuck on tiny defects in the material. That's flux pinning. To move the disc, you'd have to drag every thread off its defect. So it fights you in every direction, and stays wherever you leave it, even upside down.

On a round track, though, it glides, because the field looks the same all the way round. The threads never have to move.

The classic 1987 demo was a magnet floating over a pellet: pure repulsion, like sitting on a cushion. Nothing holds it sideways, so it slides off. Pinning adds the grip.

It's also not the maglev you know. Shanghai's Transrapid needs a computer holding a one-centimetre gap, all the time. Japan's SCMaglev rolls on wheels until it's fast enough to float. A pinned train floats standing still, with no power for lift. The price: magnets along the whole route, and liquid nitrogen on board.

So people built things you could ride. In 2015, Lexus revealed a hoverboard, cooled by liquid nitrogen, over a hoverpark near Barcelona with up to two hundred metres of magnets. People rode it, but Lexus said it would not be on sale, and it only floats over its own track.

Germany's SupraTrans two, a two-seater on an eighty-metre oval, is now on show in Karlsruhe. In Rio, the Maglev-Cobra ran on a two-hundred-metre university line. About twenty thousand people rode it, until the pandemic and a lack of funds stopped it in 2020. In 2024, a new twenty-seat driverless car arrived, and this July, its maker Aerom licensed the technology.

Then, in January 2021, Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu unveiled this: a twenty-one-metre carbon-fibre car. The headlines said six hundred and twenty kilometres an hour.

Quick catch: six-twenty is a design target. The test line is a hundred and sixty-five metres long. At six-twenty, you'd be off the end in under a second.

In 2021, there was talk of commercial service in three to five years. That hasn't happened. But the car still floats: this May, students from the US took trial rides. The university is also building a vacuum tube for these trains, aimed at fifteen hundred kilometres an hour. No maglev run has been reported yet.

So where did the disc really go? Into tape. Take REBCO, the same family of material as YBCO, lay about a micron of it on a metal strip, and wind the strip into coils.

Engineers add tiny defects on purpose, so the vortices stay pinned. If they move, they waste energy, and the magnet can quench. The disc used pinning to hold itself in a field. A fusion coil uses it to carry current through its own enormous field.

In 2021, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and MIT ramped a magnet made of this tape to twenty tesla. Now they're building a fusion machine called SPARC, more than seventy-five percent complete, with first plasma aimed for 2027.

And in September, CFS ordered more than ten thousand kilometres of this tape from Fujikura. The largest tape order ever.

Of course, physics this strange attracts fakes. Two months after the clip came Controlled Quantum Levitation on a WipEout Track, from a "Japan Institute of Science and Technology": lab coats, gloves, and a tiny racer flying round a track.

It was CGI, made by students at Centre NAD in Montréal. The internet believed a racing-game track was real, because the real thing looked just as unreal.

In 2023 came LK-99. Researchers in Korea claimed superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure. Clips showed a flake half-floating, one edge still touching the magnet. Andrew McCalip live-tweeted a home attempt: "We made the rocks."

By mid-August, replications had explained it: an impurity mimicked the resistance drop, and ordinary magnetism explained the half-float. Nature's headline: "LK-99 isn't a superconductor." And you know the tell now. A real superconductor like YBCO would have locked.

Ranga Dias, at the University of Rochester, claimed room-temperature superconductivity under pressure in Nature, twice. Both papers were retracted, a university investigation found research misconduct, and by late 2024, Dias no longer worked there.

The real frontier moves slower. This March, a University of Houston team reported Hg-1223 superconducting at a hundred and fifty-one kelvin, at normal pressure. If it holds, it beats a 1993 record by about eighteen degrees. It's still about a hundred and forty degrees short of room temperature.

So: no hoverboards in the shops, and no six-twenty trains. But the disc's family of material is being wound into fusion magnets. And that website that ran out of traffic in 2011? It still sells levitation kits.

If you could ride one of these, the Lexus board, the train in Rio or the car in Chengdu, which would you pick? Tell me in the comments.