A superconductor free of quasiparticles for seconds
Superconducting devices, based on the Cooper pairing of electrons, play an important role in existing and emergent technologies, ranging from radiation detectors1,2 to quantum computers3. Their performance is limited by spurious quasiparticle excitations formed from broken Cooper pairs4–12. Efforts to achieve ultra-low quasiparticle densities have reached time-averaged numbers of excitations on th