Discovery of the first room-temperature superconductor - kind of...
It’s finally here: Scientists have reported the discovery of the first room-temperature superconductor, after more than a century of waiting.
Now, scientists have found the first superconductor that operates at room temperature — at least given a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of about 15° Celsius, physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues report October 14 in Nature.
Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15° C, the electrical resistance vanished.
