The First Room-Temperature Superconductor Has Finally Been Found
Joe2020 shares a report from Science News: Now, scientists have found the first superconductor that operates at room temperature -- at least given a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of about 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues report October 14 in Nature. The team's results "are nothing short of beautiful," says materials chemist Russell Hemley of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved with the research. However, the new material's superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, limiting its practical usefulness. Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15 degrees C, the electrical resistance vanished. That alone wasn't enough to convince Dias. "I didn't believe it the first time," he says. So the team studied additional samples of the material and investigated its magnetic properties. Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash -- strong magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the material was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team also applied an oscillating magnetic field to the material, and showed that, when the material became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity. The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.
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