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Hydrogen sulfide — the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs — conducts electricity with zero resistance at a record high temperature of 203 kelvin (–70 °C), reports a paper published today in Nature1.
The first results of the work, which represents a historic step towards finding a room-temperature superconductor, were released on the arXiv preprint server in December2 and followed up by more in June3. They have already sparked a wave of excitement within the research community.
A superconductor that works at room-temperature would make everyday electricity generation and transmission vastly more efficient, as well as giving a massive boost to current uses of superconductivity such as the enormous magnets used in medical imaging machines.
In an accompanying News & Views article on Nature's website, Igor Mazin of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC describes the hydrogen sulfide discovery as "the holy grail of superconductors"4. Physicist Fan Zhang of the University of Texas at Dallas agrees, saying that the finding is "historic" and that its impact will be "far ranging".
The results are the work of Mikhail Eremets, Alexander Drozdov and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. They find that when they subject samples of hydrogen sulfide to extremely high pressures — around 1.5 million atmospheres (150 gigapascals) — and cool them below 203 K, the samples display the classic hallmarks of superconductivity: zero electrical resistance and a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect. The Meissner effect occurs when a superconducting material is placed in an external magnetic field and there is no field inside the sample, unlike in normal materials.
Read more here. (Nature)
The first results of the work, which represents a historic step towards finding a room-temperature superconductor, were released on the arXiv preprint server in December2 and followed up by more in June3. They have already sparked a wave of excitement within the research community.
A superconductor that works at room-temperature would make everyday electricity generation and transmission vastly more efficient, as well as giving a massive boost to current uses of superconductivity such as the enormous magnets used in medical imaging machines.
In an accompanying News & Views article on Nature's website, Igor Mazin of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC describes the hydrogen sulfide discovery as "the holy grail of superconductors"4. Physicist Fan Zhang of the University of Texas at Dallas agrees, saying that the finding is "historic" and that its impact will be "far ranging".
The results are the work of Mikhail Eremets, Alexander Drozdov and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. They find that when they subject samples of hydrogen sulfide to extremely high pressures — around 1.5 million atmospheres (150 gigapascals) — and cool them below 203 K, the samples display the classic hallmarks of superconductivity: zero electrical resistance and a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect. The Meissner effect occurs when a superconducting material is placed in an external magnetic field and there is no field inside the sample, unlike in normal materials.
Read more here. (Nature)
