- A new compound superconducts at room temperature—and almost 300 gigapascals of pressure.
- The scientists believe they can change the mix to reduce the required pressure.
For the first time ever, physicists achieved superconducting at “room temperature,” meaning without supercooling the conductive material. In this case, the room temperature is the one set by a stingy family member: just a shade under 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The implications for electrical engineering and physics could be staggering, but there’s still a huge catch.
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The previous record, ScienceAlert explains, was nearly -10 degrees Fahrenheit—but even that was a major step toward room temperature. Let’s talk about superconductivity, the promise it holds, and why it’s been held back by the logistics of supercooling. Then we can explain how this new record is totally different.
A superconductor is a material that conducts electricity, which just refers to a steady stream of electrons through a medium. Regular conductors are pretty good, like electrical lines and the cables we use in our homes. But they shed some energy in the form of resistance.
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Semiconductors, used in computer circuitry and much more, use properties of both conductance and resistance to create logical gates that direct electrons. It’s like Plinko, but on purpose. Superconductors sound impossible: they’re materials that conduct, yet have no resistance. The consequences of that are mind-boggling, from high-speed computing, to nuclear power, to the incredible magnets that power MRIs and other equipment.
By squeezing carbon, sulphur, and hydrogen—carbonaceous sulphur hydride—in a diamond anvil, researchers found that compound superconducted all the way up to almost 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
But so far, superconductors all require cooling. For a long time, this has been extreme cooling—like approaching absolute zero with million-dollar cryogenics extreme. The very few examples of materials that superconduct at less cool (but still extremely cold) temperatures represent decades of work. The new, much warmer superconductor represents a careful combination of the right chemical compound with the right amount of pressure.
The secret, chemistry-wise, is in choosing elements that bond very readily, but are still really light. This is why hydrogen, which is so bondy that it’s extraordinarily difficult to isolate, is a key component in each of the superconductors that have steadily marched toward ambient temperature.
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By squeezing carbon, sulphur, and hydrogen—carbonaceous sulphur hydride—in a diamond anvil, researchers found that compound superconducted all the way up to almost 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The diamond anvil applies almost 300 gigapascals of pressure, which represents roughly 3 million times the ambient air pressure on Earth, for an extraordinarily tiny amount of carbonaceous sulphur hydride.
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But even within those extreme parameters, this is still the first material to superconduct at a temperature even nearly this high. Now that the researchers have landed on a chemical mix that holds up to temperature, they can turn their efforts to remixing it for closer to ambient pressure as well.
“The superconducting state is observed over a broad pressure range in the diamond anvil cell, from 140 to 275 gigapascals, with a sharp upturn in transition temperature above 220 gigapascals,” the researchers explain in their paper. That means while the material superconducted over a huge range of climbing pressure, it only tolerated the highest air temperatures while it was at the highest pressures, too.
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