Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.
Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.
Dias says developing materials that are superconducting — without electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic field at room temperature — is the "holy grail" of condensed matter physics. Sought for more than a century, such materials "can definitely change the world as we know it," Dias says.
In setting the new record, Dias and his research team combined hydrogen with carbon and sulfur to photochemically synthesize simple organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in a diamond anvil cell, a research device used to examine miniscule amounts of materials under extraordinarily high pressure.
The carbonaceous sulfur hydride exhibited superconductivity at about 58 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 39 million psi. This is the first time that superconducting material has been observed at room temperatures.
"Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined. However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications," says Dias, who is also affiliated with the University's Materials Science and High Energy Density Physics programs.
Applications include:
- Power grids that transmit electricity without the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours (MWh) of the energy that now occurs due to resistance in the wires.
- A new way to propel levitated trains and other forms of transportation.
- Medical imaging and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography
- Faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology.
The amount of superconducting material created by the diamond anvil cells is measured in picoliters — about the size of a single inkjet particle.
The next challenge, Dias says, is finding ways to create the room temperature superconducting materials at lower pressures, so they will be economical to produce in greater volume. In comparison to the millions of pounds of pressure created in diamond anvil cells, the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level is about 15 PSI.
Why room temperature matters
First discovered in 1911, superconductivity gives materials two key properties. Electrical resistance vanishes. And any semblance of a magnetic field is expelled, due to a phenomenon called the Meissner effect. The magnetic field lines have to pass around the superconducting material, making it possible to levitate such materials, something that could be used for frictionless high-speed trains, known as maglev trains.
Powerful superconducting electromagnets are already critical components of maglav trains, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines, particle accelerators and other advanced technologies, including early quantum supercomputers.
But the superconducting materials used in the devices usually work only at extremely low temperatures — lower than any natural temperatures on Earth. This restriction makes them costly to maintain — and too costly to extend to other potential applications. "The cost to keep these materials at cryogenic temperatures is so high you can't really get the full benefit of them," Dias says.
Previously, the highest temperature for a superconducting material was achieved last year in the lab of Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and the Russell Hemley group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That team reported superconductivity at -10 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit using lanthanum superhydride.
Researchers have also explored copper oxides and iron-based chemicals as potential candidates for high temperature superconductors in recent years. However, hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — also offers a promising building block.
"To have a high temperature superconductor, you want stronger bonds and light elements. Those are the two very basic criteria," Dias says. "Hydrogen is the lightest material, and the hydrogen bond is one of the strongest.
"Solid metallic hydrogen is theorized to have high Debye temperature and strong electron-phonon coupling that is necessary for room temperature superconductivity," Dias says.
However, extraordinarily high pressures are needed just to get pure hydrogen into a metallic state, which was first achieved in a lab in 2017 by Harvard University professor Isaac Silvera and Dias, then a postdoc in Silvera's lab.
A 'paradigm shift'
And so, Dias's lab at Rochester has pursued a "paradigm shift" in its approach, using as an alternative, hydrogen-rich materials that mimic the elusive superconducting phase of pure hydrogen, and can be metalized at much lower pressures.
First the lab combined yttrium and hydrogen. The resulting yttrium superhydride exhibited superconductivity at what was then a record high temperature of about 12 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 26 million pounds per square inch.
Next the lab explored covalent hydrogen-rich organic-derived materials.
This work resulted in the carbonaceous sulfur hydride. "This presence of carbon is of tantamount importance here," the researchers report. Further "compositional tuning" of this combination of elements may be the key to achieving superconductivity at even higher temperatures, they add.
Reference: "Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride" by Elliot Snider, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride, Mathew Debessai, Hiranya Vindana, Kevin Vencatasamy, Keith V. Lawler, Ashkan Salamat and Ranga P. Dias, 14 October 2020, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2801-z
Other coauthors on the paper include lead author Elliot Snider '19 (MS), Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon '18 (MA), Raymond McBride '20 (MS), Kevin Vencatasamy '21, and Hiranya Vindana (MS), all of the Dias lab; Mathew Debessai (Ph.D) of Intel Corporation, and Keith Lawlor (Ph.D) of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
The project was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Academic Alliance Program and its Office of Science, Fusion Energy Sciences. Preparation of the diamond surfaces was performed in part at the University of Rochester Integrated Nanosystems Center (URnano).
Dias and Salamat have started a new company, Unearthly Materials to find a path to room temperature superconductors that can be scalably produced at ambient pressure.
Patents are pending. Anyone interested in licensing the technology can contact Curtis Broadbent, licensing manager at URVentures.
Reader Comments
Always remember to be humble!
You are only a visitor, subject to recall at any moment. You are no more than a speck of dust within the scope of time, space and eternity. All granted by the good grace of your creator. No country ever taxed, spent, ruled and regulated itself in to prosperity. Unfortunately way too many of our politicians are either to ignorant or dumb, especially the ones on the left to understand this concept. Joyly
I guess recall is like passing, because I think this is only the first step. I think God sees us His children as much greater than a speck of dust and offers eternal life. Each human soul has more potential power than the sun; we have no idea how powerful we are.
Opps, missed this:
They're substituting super-low temperatures for super-high pressures.
A Diamond Anvil? You know how those things work?
-You put a diamond in a vice, make one of its faces the focal point of the vice pressure, and then crank the vice until you approach enough force to nearly crush the diamond. If the material you put under the diamond happens to super-conduct when you squeeze it that much.., (probably because you're decreasing the distance between atoms by main force rather than by freezing...) well, how is that useful exactly?
It's not.., yet.
I like the cold fusion approach; you electrically stimulate a material to grow crystals within a confined molecular space so that pressure builds up enough at the atomic level to cause fusion.
Maybe there's something to that..?
I wonder if Bob Lazar's Element 115 was something along those lines..? A substance whose properties only manifest when you push it to its material limits.
Hmm...
RC
Bruce and I became close friends in years before his death and I've had cautious hands on the large N-'Machine he built before tall guys in grey suits convinced his California-based investor's family that their husband was squandering their inheritance on a 'perpetual motion machine' and that, really, they ought to commit him. They did so and killed Bruce's funding.
The N-machine you can see on the linked page.
Bruce once worked for David Hafler of '60s & '70s DynaKit fame and designed for him the all time largest selling series of Dynakit pre- and power amplifiers. I design such gear and Bruce and I had a lot of fun with some of that.
The N-Machine is a unique, rotating, DC generator that doesn't doesn't reflect to its motive driver the energies its driven load dissipates, it violates Lenz law in other words and if one could figure out how to make it more efficient one would have an 'over-unity' machine, one that creates more load driving power than required to drive it. A solution to the world's energy shortfall in other words.
A year or so before his death I provided Bruce with a re-design of his very simple N-Machine that provided a low-reluctance magnetic return path. Those who'll look at Bruce's original work and know something about magnetics will see that the magnetic return path is an open airpath, my rework closes that path. Bruce called me after my e-mail with the design and I swear I heard him slap his forehead, clear down in New Zealand.
Nearly 20 years ago I sent copy of my design to Ark for consideration but never did hear back, there are interesting insights to be gleaned thru the study of all that..
I've mentioned this work here before, but not for quite a few years.
BTW, You're another of those physics wise SOTTites I rely on.
THANKS!
RC
If the Nazis could get saucer tech from aliens - various *different* free energy engines working together to drive saucer craft based on mercury!! - and build very well working models, then its really hard to deny that the Deep State was very well able to use Tesla's and De Palma's and Edgar Cayce's motor technology to build super-advanced engines and manned + drone craft.
So there was a Brazilian man - IIRC -, who invented a water driven motor, by changing a simple piece of machinery in his motorcycle to separate water into burnable oxygen and hydrogen and so drive his simple, home made (rather changed) engines. Allegedly this motor can work with ground water and then probably with water from rivers and puddles as well.
Just one thing I found unbelievable in this: if you pour even tap water into this engine - or ground water, then just imagine how your pipes in your water-heater get calcified badly with time. But think about the sludge, the junk in a groundwater well. How exactly could a simple gas-based motor modified to burn water instead of gas - work - with ground water or even tap water, when there is so much sludge that would STICK to the internal parts of the motor - where the fuel flowed earlier = now impure water flows. So how would you clean such a motor from sludge and calcium deposits?
[Link] Get a water softener?
There is obviously problems with this water powered "invention" using ground water. Should be using ionized, purified water instead, which instantly makes it more expensive.
All as I recall. Color me SUPER skeptical. Have a link?
RC
* Edit. Actually, relates more to my final point it appears: "hy·drol·y·sis Chemistry noun: hydrolysis the chemical breakdown of a compound due to reaction with water."
** Water is called the "universal solvent" because it is capable of dissolving more substances than any other liquid. This is important to every living thing on earth.
RC
And it breaks down under certain conditions to its component parts which can be reused - ultimate recycling. Clever clever God.
I think the greatest invention in the History of Humankind - beside the much needed propagation of Love everywhere in all professions and industries - based on Love from the bottom of our hearts, so the greatest invention will be the SeaWater Replaces Oil in all engines. Non-destructive would be best, as we definitely can use sea-salts. No more oil based pollution, no more petrol based cosmetic products. No more plastics!
There will be a need to create a plastic-mimicking substance consisting of water and salt. So when you lick such a "NeoPlast" bowl, it will taste slightly salty and will be fully recyclable back into seawater.
No more pollution of the oceans with oil-based plastics.