“It’s a historic achievement,” announced a team from the University of Rochester led by Professor Ranga Dias after successfully creating a viable superconducting material at room temperature and a relatively low pressure compared to previous attempts. The study was published this week in the journal Nature.
“With this material, nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH), the dawn of superconductivity in ambient conditions and applied technologies has arrived,” the authors emphasized. This new material is able to function as a superconductor at just 20.5°C and one gigapascal of pressure, a significant reduction from the 270 gigapascals required in previous work.
Although one gigapascal may seem like a high pressure compared to sea level pressure, which is only 15 psi, modern engineering techniques, like those used in chip manufacturing, can handle even higher internal chemical pressures.
Scientists are celebrating this breakthrough as they have pursued superconductivity in ambient conditions for over a century. Superconducting materials have the advantage of eliminating electrical resistance and expelling magnetic fields, offering vast potential in new technological applications.
In the future, these superconductors could revolutionize power grids, allowing for electricity transmission without energy loss. They could also transform transportation with frictionless levitating high-speed trains, more affordable medical imaging techniques, advances in tokamak machines for nuclear fusion, and more efficient and faster electronics.
Dias highlights that through engineering tools called strain, they believe they can “grow this material on a nanoribbon scale that could be used for chip manufacturing.” However, the team had to overcome obstacles, as their previous work on superconducting materials was retracted due to criticism and doubts. This time, they have made great efforts to thoroughly document their research and have subjected their new work to five rounds of review.
The new compound was created with a mix of 99% hydrogen and 1% nitrogen, which reacted with a pure lutetium sample for two or three days. This process resulted in a compound with color changing during compression, from blue to pink at the onset of superconductivity and then to bright red in a non-superconducting state. This visual phenomenon led researchers to call the material reddmatter, in reference to the 2009 film “Star Trek.”
The team now aims to use machine learning algorithms to predict other possible superconducting materials, mixing combinations of rare earth metals with nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. “The path to superconducting consumer electronics, energy transfer lines, and improvements in magnetic confinement for fusion are a reality,” Dias concluded, marking the beginning of the “modern superconducting era.”
Referrer: MiMub in Spanish
