but it requires extremely high pressure to make, not necessarily an insurmountable impediment - sell your cables
Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.
Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.
Dias says developing materials that are superconducting—without electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic field at room temperature—is the "holy grail" of condensed matter physics. Sought for more than a century, such materials "can definitely change the world as we know it," Dias says.
In setting the new record, Dias and his research team combined hydrogen with carbon and sulfur to photochemically synthesize simple organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in a diamond anvil cell, a research device used to examine miniscule amounts of materials under extraordinarily high pressure.
The carbonaceous sulfur hydride exhibited superconductivity at about 58 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 39 million psi. This is the first time that superconducting material has been observed at room temperatures.
"Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined. However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications," says Dias, who is also affiliated with the University's Materials Science and High Energy Density Physics programs.
Applications include:
The amount of superconducting material created by the diamond anvil cells is measured in picoliters—about the size of a single inkjet particle.
The next challenge, Dias says, is finding ways to create the room temperature superconducting materials at lower pressures, so they will be economical to produce in greater volume. In comparison to the millions of pounds of pressure created in diamond anvil cells, the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level is about 15 PSI.
Previously, the highest temperature for a superconducting material was achieved last year in the lab of Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and the Russell Hemley group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That team reported superconductivity at -10 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit using lanthanum superhydride.
...
However, extraordinarily high pressures are needed just to get pure hydrogen into a metallic state, which was first achieved in a lab in 2017 by Harvard University professor Isaac Silvera and Dias, then a postdoc in Silvera's lab.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-room-temperature-superconducting-material.html
Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.
Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.
Dias says developing materials that are superconducting—without electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic field at room temperature—is the "holy grail" of condensed matter physics. Sought for more than a century, such materials "can definitely change the world as we know it," Dias says.
In setting the new record, Dias and his research team combined hydrogen with carbon and sulfur to photochemically synthesize simple organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in a diamond anvil cell, a research device used to examine miniscule amounts of materials under extraordinarily high pressure.
The carbonaceous sulfur hydride exhibited superconductivity at about 58 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 39 million psi. This is the first time that superconducting material has been observed at room temperatures.
"Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined. However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications," says Dias, who is also affiliated with the University's Materials Science and High Energy Density Physics programs.
Applications include:
- Power grids that transmit electricity without the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours (MWh) of the energy that now occurs due to resistance in the wires.
- A new way to propel levitated trains and other forms of transportation.
- Medical imaging and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography
- Faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology.
The amount of superconducting material created by the diamond anvil cells is measured in picoliters—about the size of a single inkjet particle.
The next challenge, Dias says, is finding ways to create the room temperature superconducting materials at lower pressures, so they will be economical to produce in greater volume. In comparison to the millions of pounds of pressure created in diamond anvil cells, the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level is about 15 PSI.
Previously, the highest temperature for a superconducting material was achieved last year in the lab of Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and the Russell Hemley group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That team reported superconductivity at -10 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit using lanthanum superhydride.
...
However, extraordinarily high pressures are needed just to get pure hydrogen into a metallic state, which was first achieved in a lab in 2017 by Harvard University professor Isaac Silvera and Dias, then a postdoc in Silvera's lab.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-room-temperature-superconducting-material.html