Scientists discovered a new room-temperature superconductor that could boost the power of quantum computer chips by effortlessly conveying electricity in everyday conditions.
This week's announcement could lead to the transformation of almost any technology that uses electric energy. It opens up many new possibilities for mobile devices, magnetically levitating trains, and future fusion power plants.
Discovery of New Room-Temperature Superconductor
Usually, electricity flow meets with resistance while it moves through wires, similar to friction in other materials, causing energy loss. Roughly a century ago, physicists discovered materials now known as superconductors. In these, electrical resistance appeared to have magically disappeared.
However, these materials only lose their resistance at unearthly, ultracold temperatures, which causes limitations on practical applications. Scientists have looked for superconductors that could work at room temperature for several decades.
This week's discovery announcement is the latest attempt to look for those kinds of superconductors. However, the team that made the discovery faces widespread skepticism due to a paper published in 2020 that described a promising but impractical superconducting material that was retracted after questioning its data, as per the New York Times.
The recently discovered superconductor is made of lutetium, considered a rare earth metal, along with hydrogen with a little bit of nitrogen. It has to be compressed with a pressure of 14,500 pounds per square inch before it gains the capabilities that surpass other superconductors.
The pressure needed is roughly ten times that exerted at the bottom of the ocean's deepest trenches. However, it is also only one-hundredth of what the result in 2020 required, similar to forces observed several thousand miles within the Earth's crust.
This finding suggests that further investigations of the material could result in a superconductor capable of working at ambient room temperatures and at the atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch.
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Facing Widespread Skepticism
The superconductivity involved in the latest discovery requires electrons to pair up with each other and form what scientists call Cooper pairs. One factor that encourages these is a high-frequency vibration called a phonon among the atomic nuclei that the electrons are associated with, according to Ars Technica.
Scientists hope they can use the newly-discovered chemicals to identify the general principles needed to produce similar hydrogen-rich superconductivity. They will then use those to identify other chemicals with similar behavior under conditions that could be easier to maintain in real-world scenarios.
The recent discovery was made by researchers from the University of Rochester led by Ranga Dias. He said that the most exciting part of the situation was the pressure they used to produce the results they found.
The scientists, along with Ashkan Salamat's team at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that the electrical resistance of the superconductor falls to zero at room temperature. Such materials could help the fight against climate change by reducing 5% of electricity lost as heat through the flow of energy, said Chemistry World.
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