A new material based on lutetium, nitrogen, and hydrogen can maintain superconductivity at room temperature. article about it published in nature.
The phenomenon of superconductivity has been known since the middle of the 20th century, thanks to this effect, direct current can flow through a wire with zero resistance and without ohmic heating. This enables very high power transmission, including the creation of powerful superconducting magnets. However, over a long period of time, superconductivity could only be achieved at liquid helium temperature; A few decades ago, materials appeared in which this effect was observed at the “high” temperature of liquid nitrogen, -195 degrees. In recent years, physicists have been trying to create a material that requires no cooling and would work like a superconductor at room temperature.
Nathan Dazenbrock-Gammon of the University of Rochester and colleagues created such a material from atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen and lutetium, a metal of the lanthanide group. Addition of nitrogen to a lutetium hydride (H)-based superconductor3Lu), as conceived by the authors, was to increase the number of charge carriers in this material and potentially increase the temperature at which it remains stable.
During the study, the scientists prepared lutetium hydride and compressed it to a pressure of 32,000 atmospheres in a nitrogen atmosphere using a special press, a diamond anvil cell, to create extremely high pressure. As a result, a material whose crystal structure is not yet known was formed, which conducts the current with zero loss at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 10 thousand atmospheres. This means that the operation of equipment based on this superconductor will not require heatsink.
Subsequent experiments showed that this material often changes its structure and also loses or gains superconducting properties with increasing or decreasing pressure. It’s also unclear to scientists how many hydrogen, lutetium, and nitrogen atoms the crystals of this superconductor contain and how they are distributed in space. In the future, they hope to learn with the help of neutron beams.
Formerly paleontologists known fossilized sea anemone thought to be jellyfish.