Damn, it’s been 3 days in a row with superconductor news. As you may remember from my first article, the holy grail so to say, is to find a superconductor that would operate at room temperature which would reduced the energy expenditure on a LOT of things as we would no longer have to worry about energy being lost when transporting electricity (which can only be a good thing at a time when a barrel of oil will cost you your firstborn). Well it turns out, that just a few days ago, an international team of scientists took a giant step towards it, with some impressive experimental verification of superconducting Hydrogen.
The trick? Put the hydrogen under very high pressure. Here’s what the lead-researchers, Dr. John Tse had to say:
“We can show that if you put hydrogen in a molecular compound and apply high pressure, you can get superconductivity,” . “Validation of this hypothesis and understanding of the mechanism are initial steps for design of better super-conducting materials.”
“Our research in this area is aimed at improving the critical temperature for superconductivity so that new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant,” said Tse.
“It has long been hypothesized that hydrogen, the simplest of the elements, may be able to conduct electricity without creating friction or heat loss (superconductive behavior) if it’s compressed into a very dense solid form. Though many researchers have tried using pure hydrogen, they have not been able to achieve the necessary hydrogen density to produce superconductivity.”
I originally found the story over at nextenergynews.com (the article was also popular on Digg and Reddit), where they claim that they have in fact found a superconductor at room-temperature. But to be honest, to me it sounds more like they have given a proof of concept in regards to compressed Hydrogen superconductors, and hypothesize that this should lead to a superconductor at room-temperature. I was not able to find the actual article to read it through and find out, all i had to go on was the press-release from Dr.Tse’s University .
It would also be interesting to know more about the feasibility of producing a stable material at a pressure that high. It looks like they used a synchrotron (a large machine that accelerates electrons in circles at high energies) to test their theory this time around, so you can’t help but wonder if this is something that is actually commercially viable. [see coments below] I will try and get in contact with Dr.Tse, maybe he can spare a few minutes and explain if they have in fact made a superconductor at room-temperature and what the commercial feasibility of this is.
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March 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 am
They have a similar article here; the difference is presumably that their press release is about an experiment where they actually saw superconductivity.
It looks like the basic substance of interest is metallic hydrogen. The pressures required to produce this are so enormous it’s a challenge to experiment on, so people are looking for other materials that will behave similarly. Since hydrogen is absorbed into metals, people thought that hydrides, suitably compressed, might behave like metallic hydrogen. Simulations - which are what Dr. Tse seems to specialize in - predicted that AlH3 ought to behave like metallic hydrogen, and in particular become superconductive. Alas, when they put some in a diamond anvil cell, they saw phase changes but no superconductivity.
Presumably in the experiment they’re announcing, they did see superconductivity. Whether they were using lower temperatures, or a different material, or higher pressures, or something else I don’t know.
The synchrotron they mention is just a light source for doing spectroscopy on these weird materials. It’s not involved in actually making the materials.
March 22nd, 2008 at 11:58 am
Hey Anne, first off sorry your comment didn’t go straight in, for some reason it was sent to moderation and i had to approve it (which i shouldn’t happen, all other comments have so far gone in automatically).
I think you are right, i remember reading about there possibly being a super-compressed Hydrogen core in some of the gas-giants, that was speculated to be supercompressed. I guess that gives a nice image of just what kind of pressures we’re talking about here.
On the synchrotron, you are probably right there too, i somehow read that that they used it to create the pressure, which really didn’t make any sense to me (i’ve used a synchrotron before, but to study the scattering off crystals), but that’s somehow what i read so i went with it :)
Anyway! I can report that i have contacted Dr. Tse and he told me that it was indeed NOT superconducting at room-temperature, he was originally misquoted in EETimes which lead to the subsequent misquotes. I sent him another email asking for a few clarifications, and hope to post about it all soon. Hopefully we can get that popular on the social networking sites to rectify this misunderstanding (the story hit Digg and Reddit a few days ago claiming superconductivity at room-temp).