U.S. News: New Superconductor Is Called a Breakthrough --- Scientists' creation has potential to realize efficient electrical grid and better battery life

"U.S. scientists say they have produced the first commercially accessible material that eliminates the loss of energy as electricity moves along a wire, a breakthrough that could mean longer-lasting batteries, more-efficient power grids and improved high-speed trains.

Materials that can conduct electric currents without any loss -- so-called superconductors -- have been wildly impractical because they typically need to be extremely cooled, to around minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, and subjected to extreme pressure to work.

Now, a group of researchers at the University of Rochester report that they have created a new superconductor that can operate at room temperature and a much lower pressure than previously discovered superconducting materials.

The breakthrough has the potential to create lossless electrical grids, and better and cheaper magnets for use in future nuclear fusion reactors, among other things, according to Ranga Dias, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics at Rochester, who led the breakthrough work. That is because perfect conductors that work in everyday, ambient conditions don't require expensive, large cooling systems.

"We could magnetically levitate trains above superconducting rails, change the way electricity is stored and transferred, and revolutionize medical imaging," Dr. Dias said.

Superconductors demonstrate what physicists call the Meissner effect, when a material expels its magnetic field. If you put a superconductor near a magnet, it will levitate, he added.

In 2020, his group reported that they had created a superconductor made up of a hydrogen, sulfur and carbon combination that operated at roughly room temperature. The catch was it only worked after being baked by a laser and crushed between the tips of two diamonds to a pressure greater than that found in the center of the Earth, in a device known as a diamond anvil cell.

For the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, the researchers tweaked their superconductor recipe -- adding nitrogen and a rare-earth metal known as lutetium to the hydrogen instead of sulfur and carbon -- and again heated and squeezed it in the diamond anvil cell.

They named the resulting material "reddmatter," which they found could exist at 69 degrees Fahrenheit and 145,000 pounds per square inch of pressure -- about 1/360th of the pressure in Earth's core. That is about a 10-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature and a drop to about 1/1,000 of the pressure compared with its predecessor from 2020.

"These results are a breakthrough for the scientific community that was enabled by [Dr. Dias's] keen chemical intuition," said Stanley Tozer, a research scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.

While a far cry from the pressure people experience at sea level -- about 15 psi -- the new pressure is within "a range where engineers can jump on and make a commercially viable product," Dr. Tozer said. Engineers and material scientists can achieve pressures around 145,000 psi using specialized techniques and instruments involved in chip manufacturing and synthesizing diamonds, for instance." [1]

1. U.S. News: New Superconductor Is Called a Breakthrough --- Scientists' creation has potential to realize efficient electrical grid and better battery life
Woodward, Aylin.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Mar 2023: A.3.