A controversial superconductor may be a game-changer – if the claim is true

LA VEGAS — That’s a bold statement: the quest to create a superconductor that works under practical conditions is finally realized, explains a team of researchers. But controversy has lingered over the team’s earlier claim of record superconductivity, suggesting the new result will come under scrutiny.

Many materials become superconductors, capable of transmitting electricity without resistance, provided they are cooled to very low temperatures. A few superconductors work in hotter conditions, but these must be pressed at overwhelming pressures, which means they are also impractical to use.

Now the researchers say they’ve created a superconductor that works at room temperature and relatively low pressure. A superconductor operating under such mundane conditions could herald a new era of high-efficiency machinery, ultra-sensitive instrumentation and revolutionary electronics.

“This is the beginning of a new kind of material that is useful for practical applications,” Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, said March 7 at the American Physical Society meeting.

The team reported the new result with a material composed of hydrogen, nitrogen and lutetium. Dias and his colleagues mixed the elements together in a device known as a diamond anvil cell. They then varied the pressure and measured the resistance to electrical flow in the compound.

At temperatures as high as around 294 kelvins (21° Celsius or 70° Fahrenheit), the material seemed to lose all resistance to electrical flow. It still needed pressures of 10 kilobars, or about 10,000 times the pressure of our atmosphere. But that’s far below the millions of atmospheres of pressure typically required for superconductors that operate near room temperature. If confirmed, this makes the material much more promising for real-world applications.

The research is likely to face significant skepticism, in part due to the firestorm sparked by the team’s earlier publication which claimed discovery of superconductivity in carbonaceous sulfur hydride at 15°C (SN: 10/14/20). Editors at Nature removed this paperdespite the objection of Dias and his co-authors, citing irregularities in the researchers’ handling of the data that undermined the editors’ confidence in the claims (SN: 03/10/22).