A room-temperature superconductor is a hypothetical material capable of displaying superconductivity above 0 °C (273 K; 32 °F), operating temperatures which are commonly encountered in everyday settings. As of 2023, the material with the highest accepted superconducting temperature was highly pressurized lanthanum decahydride, whose transition temperature is approximately 250 K (−23 °C) at 200 GPa. [1] [2]
At standard atmospheric pressure, cuprates currently hold the temperature record, manifesting superconductivity at temperatures as high as 138 K (−135 °C). [3] Over time, researchers have consistently encountered superconductivity at temperatures previously considered unexpected or impossible, challenging the notion that achieving superconductivity at room temperature was infeasible. [4] [5] The concept of "near-room temperature" transient effects has been a subject of discussion since the early 1950s.
Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductors ("high" being temperatures above 77 K (−196.2 °C; −321.1 °F), the boiling point of liquid nitrogen), several materials have been claimed, although not confirmed, to be room-temperature superconductors. [6]
In 2014, an article published in Nature suggested that some materials, notably YBCO (yttrium barium copper oxide), could be made to briefly superconduct at room temperature using infrared laser pulses. [7]
In 2015, an article published in Nature by researchers of the Otto Hahn Institute suggested that under certain conditions such as extreme pressure H
2 S transitioned to a superconductive form H
3 S at 150 GPa (around 1.5 million times atmospheric pressure) in a diamond anvil cell. [8] The critical temperature is 203 K (−70 °C) which would be the highest Tc ever recorded and their research suggests that other hydrogen compounds could superconduct at up to 260 K (−13 °C). [9] [10]
Also in 2018, researchers noted a possible superconducting phase at 260 K (−13 °C) in lanthanum decahydride ( LaH
10) at elevated (200 GPa) pressure. [11] In 2019, the material with the highest accepted superconducting temperature was highly pressurized lanthanum decahydride, whose transition temperature is approximately 250 K (−23 °C). [1] [2]
In 1993 and 1997, Michel Laguës and his team published evidence of room temperature superconductivity observed on MBE deposited ultrathin nanostructures of BiSrCaCuO. [12] [13] These compounds exhibit extremely low resistivities orders of magnitude below that of copper, strongly non-linear I(V) characteristics and hysteretic I(V) behavior.
In 2000, while extracting electrons from diamond during ion implantation work, Johan Prins claimed to have observed a phenomenon that he explained as room-temperature superconductivity within a phase formed on the surface of oxygen-doped type IIa diamonds in a 10−6 mbar vacuum. [14]
In 2003, a group of researchers published results on high-temperature superconductivity in palladium hydride (PdHx: x > 1) [15] and an explanation in 2004. [16] In 2007, the same group published results suggesting a superconducting transition temperature of 260 K, [17] with transition temperature increasing as the density of hydrogen inside the palladium lattice increases. This has not been corroborated by other groups.
In March 2021, an announcement reported superconductivity in a layered yttrium-palladium-hydron material at 262 K and a pressure of 187 GPa. Palladium may act as a hydrogen migration catalyst in the material. [18]
On 31 December 2023, "Global Room-Temperature Superconductivity in Graphite" was published in the journal Advanced Quantum Technologies, claiming to demonstrate superconductivity at room temperature and ambient pressure in highly oriented pyrolytic graphite with dense arrays of nearly parallel line defects. [19]
In 2012, an Advanced Materials article claimed superconducting behavior of graphite powder after treatment with pure water at temperatures as high as 300 K and above. [20] [ unreliable source? ] So far, the authors have not been able to demonstrate the occurrence of a clear Meissner phase and the vanishing of the material's resistance.
In 2018, Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey from the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore claimed the observation of superconductivity at ambient pressure and room temperature in films and pellets of a nanostructured material that is composed of silver particles embedded in a gold matrix. [21] Due to similar noise patterns of supposedly independent plots and the publication's lack of peer review, the results have been called into question. [22] Although the researchers repeated their findings in a later paper in 2019, [23] this claim is yet to be verified and confirmed.[ citation needed ]
Since 2016, a team led by Ranga P. Dias has produced a number of retracted or challenged papers in this field. In 2016 they claimed observation of solid metallic hydrogen in 2016. [24] In October 2020, they reported room-temperature superconductivity at 288 K (at 15 °C) in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride at 267 GPa, triggered into crystallisation via green laser. [25] [26] This was retracted in 2022 after flaws in their statistical methods were identified [27] and led to questioning of other data. [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] In 2023 he reported superconductivity at 294 K and 1 GPa in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride, in a paper widely met with skepticism about its methods and data. Later in 2023 he was found to have plagiarized parts of his dissertation from someone else's thesis, and to have fabricated data in a paper on manganese disulfide, which was retracted. [34] The lutetium hydride paper was also retracted.[ citation needed ] The first attempts to replicate those results failed. [35] [36] [37]
On July 23, 2023, a Korean team claimed that Cu-doped lead apatite, which they named LK-99, was superconducting up to 370 K, though they had not observed this fully. [38] They posted two preprints to arXiv, [39] published a paper in a journal, [40] and submitted a patent application. [41] The reported observations were received with skepticism by experts due to the lack of clear signatures of superconductivity. [42] The story was widely discussed on social media, leading to a large number of attempted replications, none of which had more than qualified success. By mid-August, a series of papers from major labs provided significant evidence that LK-99 was not a superconductor, finding resistivity much higher than copper, and explaining observed effects such as magnetic response and resistance drops in terms of impurities and ferromagnetism in the material. [43] [44]
Theoretical work by British physicist Neil Ashcroft predicted that solid metallic hydrogen at extremely high pressure (~500 GPa) should become superconducting at approximately room temperature, due to its extremely high speed of sound and expected strong coupling between the conduction electrons and the lattice-vibration phonons. [45]
A team at Harvard University has claimed to make metallic hydrogen and reports a pressure of 495 GPa. [46] Though the exact critical temperature has not yet been determined, weak signs of a possible Meissner effect and changes in magnetic susceptibility at 250 K may have appeared in early magnetometer tests on an original now-lost sample. A French team is working with doughnut shapes rather than planar at the diamond culette tips. [47]
In 1964, William A. Little proposed the possibility of high-temperature superconductivity in organic polymers. [48]
In 2004, Ashcroft returned to his idea and suggested that hydrogen-rich compounds can become metallic and superconducting at lower pressures than hydrogen. More specifically, he proposed a novel way to pre-compress hydrogen chemically by examining IVa hydrides. [49]
In 2014–2015, conventional superconductivity was observed in a sulfur hydride system (H
2S or H
3S) at 190 K to 203 K at pressures of up to 200 GPa.
In 2016, research suggested a link between palladium hydride containing small impurities of sulfur nanoparticles as a plausible explanation for the anomalous transient resistance drops seen during some experiments, and hydrogen absorption by cuprates was suggested in light of the 2015 results in H
2S as a plausible explanation for transient resistance drops or "USO" noticed in the 1990s by Chu et al. during research after the discovery of YBCO. [50]
It has been predicted that ScH
12 (scandium dodecahydride) would exhibit superconductivity at room temperature – Tc between 333 K (60 °C) and 398 K (125 °C) – under a pressure expected not to exceed 100 GPa. [51]
Some research efforts are currently moving towards ternary superhydrides, where it has been predicted that Li
2MgH
16 (dilithium magnesium hexadecahydride) would have a Tc of 473 K (200 °C) at 250 GPa. [52] [53]
It is also possible that if the bipolaron explanation is correct, a normally semiconducting material can transition under some conditions into a superconductor if a critical level of alternating spin coupling in a single plane within the lattice is exceeded; this may have been documented in very early experiments from 1986. The best analogy here would be anisotropic magnetoresistance, but in this case the outcome is a drop to zero rather than a decrease within a very narrow temperature range for the compounds tested similar to "re-entrant superconductivity". [54]
In 2018, support was found for electrons having anomalous 3/2 spin states in YPtBi. [55] Though YPtBi is a relatively low temperature superconductor, this does suggest another approach to creating superconductors. [56]
"Quantum bipolarons" could describe how a material might superconduct at up to nearly room temperature. [57]
Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in superconductors: materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which is not explained by the usual BCS theory or its extension, the Eliashberg theory. The pairing in unconventional superconductors may originate from some other mechanism than the electron–phonon interaction. Alternatively, a superconductor is unconventional if the superconducting order parameter transforms according to a non-trivial irreducible representation of the point group or space group of the system. Per definition, superconductors that break additional symmetries to U (1) symmetry are known as unconventional superconductors.
High-temperature superconductivity is superconductivity in materials with a critical temperature above 77 K, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at colder temperatures, close to absolute zero. The "high temperatures" are still far below ambient, and therefore require cooling. The first breakthrough of high-temperature superconductor was discovered in 1986 by IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. Although the critical temperature is around 35.1 K, this new type of superconductor was readily modified by Ching-Wu Chu to make the first high-temperature superconductor with critical temperature 93 K. Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". Most high-Tc materials are type-II superconductors.
Metallic hydrogen is a phase of hydrogen in which it behaves like an electrical conductor. This phase was predicted in 1935 on theoretical grounds by Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington.
Palladium hydride is palladium metal with hydrogen within its crystal lattice. Despite its name, it is not an ionic hydride but rather an alloy of palladium with metallic hydrogen that can be written PdHx. At room temperature, palladium hydrides may contain two crystalline phases, α and β. Pure α-phase exists at x < 0.017 while pure β-phase exists at x > 0.58; intermediate values of x correspond to α–β mixtures.
Cuprate superconductors are a family of high-temperature superconducting materials made of layers of copper oxides (CuO2) alternating with layers of other metal oxides, which act as charge reservoirs. At ambient pressure, cuprate superconductors are the highest temperature superconductors known. However, the mechanism by which superconductivity occurs is still not understood.
Iron-based superconductors (FeSC) are iron-containing chemical compounds whose superconducting properties were discovered in 2006. In 2008, led by recently discovered iron pnictide compounds, they were in the first stages of experimentation and implementation..
Covalent superconductors are superconducting materials where the atoms are linked by covalent bonds. The first such material was boron-doped synthetic diamond grown by the high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) method. The discovery had no practical importance, but surprised most scientists as superconductivity had not been observed in covalent semiconductors, including diamond and silicon.
The 122 iron arsenide unconventional superconductors are part of a new class of iron-based superconductors. They form in the tetragonal I4/mmm, ThCr2Si2 type, crystal structure. The shorthand name "122" comes from their stoichiometry; the 122s have the chemical formula AEFe2Pn2, where AE stands for alkaline earth metal (Ca, Ba Sr or Eu) and Pn is pnictide (As, P, etc.). These materials become superconducting under pressure and also upon doping. The maximum superconducting transition temperature found to date is 38 K in the Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2. The microscopic description of superconductivity in the 122s is yet unclear.
Distrontium ruthenate, also known as strontium ruthenate, is an oxide of strontium and ruthenium with the chemical formula Sr2RuO4. It was the first reported perovskite superconductor that did not contain copper. Strontium ruthenate is structurally very similar to the high-temperature cuprate superconductors, and in particular, is almost identical to the lanthanum doped superconductor (La, Sr)2CuO4. However, the transition temperature for the superconducting phase transition is 0.93 K (about 1.5 K for the best sample), which is much lower than the corresponding value for cuprates.
Iron(II) selenide refers to a number of inorganic compounds of ferrous iron and selenide (Se2−). The phase diagram of the system Fe–Se reveals the existence of several non-stoichiometric phases between ~49 at. % Se and ~53 at. % Fe, and temperatures up to ~450 °C. The low temperature stable phases are the tetragonal PbO-structure (P4/nmm) β-Fe1−xSe and α-Fe7Se8. The high temperature phase is the hexagonal, NiAs structure (P63/mmc) δ-Fe1−xSe. Iron(II) selenide occurs naturally as the NiAs-structure mineral achavalite.
CeCoIn5 ("Cerium-Cobalt-Indium 5") is a heavy-fermion superconductor with a layered crystal structure, with somewhat two-dimensional electronic transport properties. The critical temperature of 2.3 K is the highest among all of the Ce-based heavy-fermion superconductors.
Mikhail Ivanovich Eremets is an experimentalist in high pressure physics, chemistry and materials science. He is particularly known for his research on superconductivity, having discovered the highest critical temperature of 250 K (-23 °C) for superconductivity in lanthanum hydride under high pressures. Part of his research contains exotic manifestations of materials such as conductive hydrogen, polymeric nitrogen and transparent sodium.
A polyhydride or superhydride is a compound that contains an abnormally large amount of hydrogen. This can be described as high hydrogen stoichiometry. Examples include iron pentahydride FeH5, LiH6, and LiH7. By contrast, the more well known lithium hydride only has one hydrogen atom.
Lanthanum decahydride is a polyhydride or superhydride compound of lanthanum and hydrogen (LaH10) that has shown evidence of being a high-temperature superconductor. It was the first metal superhydride to be theoretically predicted, synthesized, and experimentally confirmed to superconduct at near room-temperatures. It has a superconducting transition temperature TC around 250 K (−23 °C; −10 °F) at a pressure of 150 gigapascals (22×10 6 psi), and its synthesis required pressures above approximately 160 gigapascals (23×10 6 psi).
In chemistry, a hydridonitride is a chemical compound that contains both hydride and nitride ions. These inorganic compounds are distinct from inorganic amides and imides as the hydrogen does not share a bond with nitrogen, and usually contain a larger proportion of metals.
An arsenide hydride or hydride arsenide is a chemical compound containing hydride (H−) and arsenide (As3−) ions in a single phase. They are in the class of mixed anion compounds.
Carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) is a potential superconductor that was announced in October 2020 by the lab of Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester, in a Nature paper that was later retracted. It was reported to have a superconducting transition temperature of 15 °C (59 °F) at a pressure of 267 gigapascals (GPa), which would have made it the highest-temperature superconductor discovered. The paper faced criticism due to its non-standard data analysis calling into question its conclusions, and in September 2022 it was retracted by Nature. In July 2023 a second paper by the authors was retracted from Physical Review Letters due to suspected data fabrication, and in September 2023 a third paper by the authors about N-doped lutetium hydride was retracted from Nature.
Ranga P. Dias is a researcher and academic who specializes in condensed matter physics. He is an assistant professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester (UR), and a scientist at the UR Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
The recent theory-orientated discovery of record high-temperature superconductivity (Tc~250 K) in sodalitelike clathrate LaH10 is an important advance toward room-temperature superconductors. Here, we identify an alternative clathrate structure in ternary Li
2MgH
16 with a remarkably high estimated Tc of ~473 K at 250 GPa, which may allow us to obtain room-temperature or even higher-temperature superconductivity.
In August, Ma and colleagues published a study that showed the promise of ternary superhydrides. They predicted that Li
2 MgH
16 would have a Tc of 473 K at 250 GPa, far in excess of room temperature.