Development of room temperature superconductivity

Every research field has its holy grail, and one of the holy grails of condensed matter physics is room temperature superconductivity. Superconductors are widely used. In addition to what we often call magnetic levitation, there are devices such as nuclear magnetic resonance and particle accelerators to generate strong magnetic fields.

The problem is that known superconducting materials must be cooled to extremely low temperatures to work. Even so-called "high temperature superconductors" still need to be cooled to minus 180 degrees Celsius. A superconductor that can work at room temperature will be a very important breakthrough because it will greatly reduce the loss of energy transmission over long distances and there is no need to cool these large magnets.

Unfortunately, the only room temperature superconductors found so far are those that set the room temperature to-180 degrees Celsius. For decades, physicists have been searching for the holy grail of room temperature superconductivity, but with little success. It has been known for a long time that when they are placed under pressure, they become superconducting at higher temperatures. But this has not produced much breakthrough, and its mechanism is still unknown.

In 2020, a new paper in the journal Nature revealed a new material that became superconducting at temperatures above 15 degrees Celsius. But for it to work, it needs to be put under the pressure of 267Gipaska, which is 3/4 of the pressure at the center of the earth. However, other researchers questioned the data processing methods used in the paper, and the journal Nature withdrew the paper in 2022.

Although the paper was withdrawn, it suggested that stress might really work and made many people hopeful about it. At the end of 2022, a paper from the University of Leipzig in Germany tried to understand how stress affects the transition of materials to superconductivity. They placed a widely studied superconductor (cupriate) in a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer at high pressure and observed the charge distribution between oxygen and copper atoms. They were able to prove that electrons moving between the two elements were responsible for the increase in the transition temperature.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Vientiane experience (ID:UR4351), author: Eugene Wang