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The Record For High-Temperature Superconductivity Has Been Smashed Again (technologyreview.com)
Chemists have found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
We don't need literally room temperature superconductors in order to have a lot of the benefits that people associate with room temperature superconductors. -23 C is within essentially close to the range of conventional refrigeration equipment. Once one doesn't need to rely on liquid nitrogen cooling for superconductors, the general use goes way up. The pressure is of course a pretty big issue, but if for example one had something that was a superconductor at -30 C and 2 gigapascals that would be incredibly practically useful.
And it is worth keeping in mind that even superconductors which require very cold temperatures are now being produced and used in large enough quantities that we can use them as part of the regular electric grid. The US Eastern electric grid already has a superconducting cable in Long Island https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/long-island-hts-power-cable and the Tres Amigas Superstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation is going to have superconducting lines to allow efficient transfer between the three major US grids (East, West and Texas). This sort of thing will also help renewable energy a lot; since right now, there's often more wind or solar power somewhere than one directly needs but hard to get it elsewhere, and then not enough wind or solar at some other time. More efficient grids mean that excess can be much more easily transferred to where it can be used.
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This is 170 gigapascals. That is 1.7 million atmospheres! The most powerful high explosives known only produce pressures up to about 300,000 atmospheres. This can only done in a diamond anvil which have working sizes one the order of 100 microns (barely visible speck, without magnification).
No, this is not thinkable. There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge that allows to design some other material that can do the same trick without 6 times the detonation pressure of HMX.
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They are using a diamond anvil cell. These regularly achieve hundreds of GPa (gigapascals). Wikipedia says the current record is 770 GPa. No one is going to be using these superconductors at the temperatures and pressures quoted for practical applications any time soon. At the surface of the earth we can only create these pressures in tiny volumes (these samples are 5 to 10 microns on a side). But our growing understanding of superconductivity will open avenues to optimize and use superconducting materials in more practical applications. The fact that computational models predicted high temperature superconductivity that was later observed in this material is a big advance. Early discoveries of HTC materials were purely empirical. It is also exciting that the same models predict even higher transition temperatures in Yttrium superhydrides. It is the understanding of superconductivity that will eventually create technological advances, not likely the specific high pressure superconductors studied here.