Superconductivity at room temperatures:
Professor Dias and the team made the material by taking a rare earth metal named lutetium and mixed it with hydrogen and a small part of nitrogen. They were then left to react for two or three days, at high temperatures.
The compound came out a as a rich blue, according to the paper. But it was then pressed at very high pressure, when it turned from blue to pink as it reached superconductivity, and then again became a rich red at its non-superconducting metallic state.
To work, the material still requires being heated to 20.5 degrees Celsius and compressed to about 145,000 psi.
Room temperature superconductivity has been a goal for many decades. The high pressure is an issue, but not requiring extreme cold is a huge step forward.
Not mentioned are the current density problems with other superconducting materials. That is also a huge road block for many applications.
I saw that headline in the paper and got all excited, until I read the article and realized it was impractical nonsense. It also was quite inaccurate because it claimed that all earlier superconductors require both very low temperatures (true) and very high pressures (utterly false).
Lessee, 145,000 psi is (take off socks) … 9,900 atm of pressure, the deepest point in the ocean is a mere 1,097 atm, hydrogen takes 109 atm … (drinks more tequila) … yeah, ain’t makin’ to the residential market this year.
I suggest we wait and see. This same group had a paper in Nature around 2020, which was retracted due to issues that arose with the data analysis.
Let’s see if the results can be replicated.
Using Lutetium, a fairly rare metal…and under fairly high pressures.
It’s a start, but it’s still quite a ways from being useable superconductivity
at normal temperature. Question is can they expand and improve on this.
Hmm, maybe we know now why circuits exploded in Star Trek. Pressure circuits indeed!