Per reporter: Cai Ding Per editor: Gao Han
Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his team announced at the American Physical Society meeting that they have created a new material that can achieve superconductivity at room temperature. After the news was released, it caused an uproar around the world. However, the challenge of a paper on the same topic published by the team in October 2020 eventually led to the retraction of the journal Nature, suggesting that the team's latest research will face greater scrutiny.
In the early morning of March 9, Beijing time, Langa Dias, the main author and keynote speaker of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, accepted an exclusive interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter by email.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Dias is confident that his team's new discovery will be a revolutionary technology reshaping the 21st century. However, he also pointed out that "it will take several years of hard work to apply our discovery of new materials for room-temperature superconducting materials to the real world at any scale." ”
Dias: It's going to be a revolutionary technology that will reshape the 21st century
NBD: How reliable is the new material your team discovered? How does it differ from a sulfur and hydrogen compound that your team previously discovered in terms of superconductivity?
Langa Dias: Details about our experimental work can now be found in Nature. We are very excited about this new material and the process required to achieve (room temperature) superconductivity. Of course, more work needs to be done to develop theoretically viable technologies and applications.
Professor Langa Dias (Image source: University of Rochester website)
NBD: A similar paper published by your team in 2020 claimed to have succeeded in creating room-temperature superconducting materials with a critical temperature of about 15°C at 2.6 million atmospheres, but this paper was later retracted by Nature. Are you confident enough that the new material announced by your team will pass the review this time?
Langa Dias: We are confident this time for several reasons: first, this work has been repeated several times in our University of Rochester lab and in other labs, with third-party observations and independent work verification; Second, our paper has been peer-reviewed and meets the publication's rigorous standards; Finally, we also resubmitted the 2020 paper for reconsideration by Nature, as the questions posed by the Nature editors at the time had no impact on the quality of the experimental data or the conclusions we reached. We are also confident in the quality of the work and experiments in 2020.
NBD: If your team's discovery of room-temperature superconducting materials ends up passing the review, what does that mean for the global superconducting industry? How will this reshape the superconductivity industry? What does this mean for the world?
Langa Dias: This new room-temperature superconducting material will change the entire superconducting industry, which will enable a range of technologies that will change the way we use, store, and transmit energy, not to mention more applications in computing, transportation, and medical devices. We think this will be a revolutionary technology that will reshape the 21st century.
NBD: Your team claims that at temperatures of about 21 degrees Celsius, the new material seems to have lost any resistance to the current. However, achieving superconductivity still requires a pressure of 10 kilobars, which is about 10,000 times the pressure in the atmosphere. But that's well below the millions of atmospheres typically required for room-temperature superconductors. So, since such a large pressure is required, can the room-temperature superconducting material discovered by your team be used on a large scale in the short term? What difficulties must people overcome before large-scale adoption?
Langa Dias: It will take several years of hard work to apply our discovery of new materials for room-temperature superconducting materials to the real world at any scale. These challenges are technical in nature, but they can all be overcome.
Further reading | The new material achieves superconductivity at room temperature
According to a paper that has been published in the journal Nature, Dr. Dias and his team have discovered a new material composed of hydrogen, nitrogen and lutetium that exhibits superconductivity at pressures of about 69 degrees Fahrenheit (about 15.5 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch). "With this new material, the dawn of room-temperature superconductivity and applied technology has arrived." Dr. Dias wrote in his paper.
Although the pressure of 145,000 psi still seems very high (about 15 psi at sea level), strain engineering, for example, often used in chip manufacturing, includes materials held together by internal chemical pressure, and the pressure is even higher.
Image source: University of Rochester website
Superconductors are lossless conductive materials that are superior to conventional conductors. Most of the existing superconducting materials need to work at extremely low temperatures, which greatly limits their large-scale application. Therefore, finding a room-temperature superconducting material has been a long-standing dream of physicists around the world.
The paper points out that materials that achieve room-temperature superconductivity can enable many applications, such as power grids that transmit electricity, without losing up to 200 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy, which is due to resistance in the wires. In addition, applications for room-temperature superconductivity include maglev trains and more affordable medical imaging and scanning technologies such as MRI and magnetocardiography, faster and more efficient electronics for digital logic and storage devices, and more.
In fact, Dr. Dias's team has previously reported in papers in Nature and Physical Review Letters that the two materials they created, carbonaceous sulfide hydride and superhydrodides, have achieved superconductivity at pressures of 58 degrees Fahrenheit (about 14.4 degrees Celsius) + 39 million pounds per square inch and 12 degrees Fahrenheit (about -11.1 degrees Celsius) + 26 million pounds per square inch, respectively.
AVIC Securities pointed out in a research report that people continue to pursue superconductivity of materials at higher critical temperatures (Tc) to achieve more large-scale application possibilities. Looking to the future, the search for room-temperature superconductors that can be used on a large scale at lower pressures is the heart of superconductivity researchers.
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