The First Room-Temperature Superconductor Has Finally Been Discovered

It is here: Researchers have reported the exploration of the first room-temperature superconductor after more than one century of waiting.

The discovery evokes daydreams of futuristic technologies which could improve electronics and transportation. Superconductors transmit electricity without resistance, enabling current to flow without any power loss. Nevertheless, all superconductors previously discovered need to be cooled, many of them to very low temperatures, making them impractical for most usages.

Now, scientists have spotted the first superconductor that operates at room temperature– at least offered a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of around 15 ° Celsius (59 ° Fahrenheit), physicist Ranga Dias of the College of Rochester in New York and colleagues report on October 14 in Nature.

The group’s outcomes “are nothing except beautiful,” states materials chemist Russell Hemley of the College of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved with the research.

However, the recent material’s superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, restricting its functional usefulness.

Dias and colleagues created the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur between the tips of 2 diamonds and hitting the product with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure around 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures below around 15 ° C, the electrical resistance disappeared.

That alone was not sufficient to convince Dias. “I did not think it the first time,” he says. So the group studied additional material samples and investigated its magnetic properties.

Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash– solid magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the product was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team additionally used an oscillating magnetic field to the product and showed that, when the product became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity.

The scientists could not determine the precise composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it hard to explain how it could be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the product more completely, Dias states.

When superconductivity was found in 1911, it was found just at temperatures close to absolute zero (− 273.15 ° C). However, since then, researchers have steadily exposed materials that superconduct at greater temperatures. In current years, scientists have accelerated that progress by focusing on hydrogen-rich products at high pressure.

Other research about superconductor

In 2015, physicist Mikhail Eremets of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and also colleagues squeezed hydrogen and sulfur to produce a superconductor at temperatures up to − 70 ° C (SN: 12/15/15). A few years later, two teams, one led by Eremets and an additional involving Hemley and also physicist Maddury Somayazulu, studied a high-pressure compound of lanthanum and hydrogen. The two groups found evidence of superconductivity at even higher temperatures of − 23 ° C and − 13 ° C, specifically, and in some samples, possibly as high as 7 ° C (SN: 9/10/18).

The discovery of a room-temperature superconductor is not a surprise. “We have been obviously heading toward this,” says academic chemist Eva Zurek of the College at Buffalo in New York, that was not involved with the research. However, breaking the symbolic room-temperature barrier is “a really big deal.”

If a room-temperature superconductor could be utilized at atmospheric pressure, it could conserve vast amounts of power lost to resistance in the electrical grid. Furthermore, it can improve current technologies, from MRI machines to quantum computers to magnetically levitated trains. Dias envisions that humanity could become a “superconducting society.”

Nevertheless, so far, scientists have developed only tiny specks of the material at high pressure, so sensible applications are still a long way off.

Still, “the temperature is not a limitation anymore,” says Somayazulu of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., which was not involved with the recent research. Instead, physicists currently have a new aim: to create a room-temperature superconductor that functions without putting on the squeeze, Somayazulu says. “That is the following large step we need to do.”

Read the original article on Science News.