Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time
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Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time:
A team of physicists in New York has discovered a material that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at room temperature - a long-sought scientific milestone. The hydrogen, carbon and sulfur compound operates as a superconductor at up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the team reported today in Nature. That's more than 50 degrees hotter than the previous high-temperature superconductivity record set last year.
"This is the first time we can really claim that room-temperature superconductivity has been found," said Ion Errea, a condensed matter theorist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was not involved in the work.
"It's clearly a landmark," said Chris Pickard, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge. "That's a chilly room, maybe a British Victorian cottage," he said of the 59-degree temperature.
Yet while researchers celebrate the achievement, they stress that the newfound compound - created by a team led by Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester - will never find its way into lossless power lines, frictionless high-speed trains, or any of the revolutionary technologies that could become ubiquitous if the fragile quantum effect underlying superconductivity could be maintained in truly ambient conditions. That's because the substance superconducts at room temperature only while being crushed between a pair of diamonds to pressures roughly 75% as extreme as those found in the Earth's core.
"People have talked about room-temperature superconductivity forever," Pickard said. "They may not have quite appreciated that when we did it, we were going to do it at such high pressures."
Materials scientists now face the challenge of discovering a superconductor that operates not only at normal temperatures but under everyday pressures, too. Certain features of the new compound raise hopes that the right blend of atoms could someday be found.
Journal Reference:
Chris J. Pickard, Ion Errea, and Mikhail I. Eremets, Superconducting Hydrides Under Pressure, Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031218-013413)
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