Emerging electron pairs in an insulator hint of a hidden mechanism that could be exploited for designer ‘high-temperature’ superconductors. Superconductors need electrons to pair, and then many pairs to become coherent inside the material. “The electron pairs are telling us that they are ready to be superconducting, but something is stopping them,” said Ke-Jun Xu, a researcher at Stanford University’s ...
Diagonal hopping by electrons explains superconductivity in cuprate ‘high-temperature’ superconductors, according to researchers associated with the Flatiron Institute in New York. The team used a straightforward two dimensional model, the Hubbard model, and hundreds of hours of supercomputer effort to get results that are close to those found in experiments. “There was tremendous excitement when cuprate superconductors were discovered, but ...
That LK-99 room-temperature superconductor from Korea University sounds interesting. But I type that wearily as, although I want ti to be true, there have been too many false starts to get too excited. Fingers crossed that the researchers have found one at last. UPDATE: It wasn’t true – it isn’t a room-temperature superconductor (link to Nature article – which is an ...
Unidirectional superconductivity without a magnetic fields is possible, according to the technical university of Delft. The proof-of-concept uses a van der Waals heterostructure with 2D materials: NbSe2 – Nb3Br8 – NbSe2, and is superconducting on one direction, and normally-conducting in the other. Compared with the semiconductor diode, “superconductors never had an equivalent of this one-way idea with no magnetic field, as ...
Russian scientists working with high-pressure room-temperature superconductors have had an anomalous result that hints at another mechanism for the effect beyond established models. Leading an international team, Artem Oganov (Skoltech and MISIS) and Ivan Troyan (Russian Academy of Sciences) performed theoretical and experimental research on the high-temperature superconductor yttrium hydride (YH6). Over the last few years, extreme pressures have be ...
Three US national laboratories have joined to create a half-meter-long prototype ‘undulator’ magnet using Niobium-3-tin. Undulators are used in free-electron lasers – lasers that create electromagnetic beams for research. Niobium-tin alloy is seen as an alternative to the incumbent niobium-titanium alloy. Niobium-titanium superconductors are good for lower magnetic fields, but stop superconducting at around 10 teslas, according to Berkeley national laboratory scientist ...
The thermoelectric effect can be used to produce entangled electrons, according to scientists from Finland, Russia, China and the USA. The proof-of-concept device is based on superconductivity, and combines a patterned single-layer graphene sheet (green) and metal (blue) electrodes on a silicon dioxide substrate (grey). Superconductivity is caused by entangled pairs of electrons called Cooper pairs. These pairs enter through one ...
Exploiting a quantum principle in a novel way, researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a miniature thermometer that works below 1K with errors less that 14mK and a response time of 5ms. Two of the novel temperature sensors (top right, bottom left) are bonded to a chip under test. A conventional wired ruthenium ...
Engineers at the University of Rochester in New York have achieved real room temperature superconductivity … …but sadly only at super-pressure. The team developed a material to compress with hydrogen – using hydrogen with carbon and sulphur to photo-chemically synthesise carbonaceous sulphur hydride in a diamond anvil cell. Peak superconducting temperature was ~15°C, achieved at ~267Gpascal. Superconductivity was available from 140 ...
Russian scientist have a found a natural link between an element’s position in the periodic table and its potential to form a high-temperature hydride superconductors, and created a neural network to predict their performance. Hydrides are thought to offer the potential for ‘high-pressure’ superconductors, as opposed to the usual ‘low-temperature’ superconductors – although they still require low temperatures. “There are predictions ...
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