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"What we have done is we have put together two materials, neither of which is a superconductor, and we found their interface, where they touch, is superconducting," says physicist Ivan Bozovic of the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"This superconducting layer is extremely thin. It is thinner than 1 nanometer, which is 1 billionth of a meter," adds Bozovic, whose findings appear in the journal Nature. "It brings us one step closer to producing mass-scale superconducting electronics."

If cooled to the material's critical operating temperature, they have no resistance to the flow of electrical current, unlike ordinary electrical wires, which can eventually overheat.

The superconducting film, developed by scientists at Brookhaven, currently only works at temperatures of 50 Kelvin or minus 223.15 degrees Celsius.

Bozovic says the ultimate goal is to develop superconducting materials that can be used at room temperature. And he thinks further study with these new ultrathin films may lend some clues on how to get there, a problem he calls "one of the most important open problems in condensed matter physics."