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The physics community was dropped another nuclear bomb!
Or because of the four words that broke the sky and seemed to win the Nobel Prize in minutes:
Room temperature superconductivity
。
In Las Vegas, at the release site of the latest results, the small lecture hall was crowded with all kinds of physics bulls. These include Professor Zhu Jingwu, a pioneer of high-temperature superconductivity, and Dirkvander Marel, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Geneva who has previously questioned room-temperature superconductivity.
The news spread, and the whole world was frying.
The state is just a whole excitement and full of hesitation.
Excitedly, although the pressure value of 1GPa is still high, in physics, it has been a major breakthrough from high pressure to near normal pressure.
Hesitantly, it's a big deal, but the research team has a dark history — last October, the team's "first room-temperature superconductor" paper on Nature's cover was forcibly retracted by Nature.
At the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, after several minutes of popularizing the history of superconductivity, RangaDias suddenly came up with the highlight - the team found another new material for room-temperature superconductivity.
The most explosive point of this material is that the superconducting phenomenon can not only be achieved at room temperature of 21 °C, but also reduces the pressure from hundreds of GPa to 1GPa.
Why is this so much attention?
After all, if room temperature superconductivity comes true, then superconducting magnet-related research, such as particle colliders, controllable nuclear fusion, quantum computers, etc., will achieve new breakthroughs, and can also reduce the problem of power transmission loss in our daily lives... In short, a huge breakthrough in physics.
Related questions directly rushed to the top of Zhihu's hot search overnight.
On Reddit, the popularity of this topic also jumps up every few minutes.
Just in the early hours of this morning, Nature also officially published the new paper from the Dias team. The timestamp shows that the paper was submitted in August 2022 and accepted by Nature on January 18 this year.
Whether the measurement results and data of the new material are true must be carefully identified by researchers in academia.
Researchers are riddled with controversy
But as many netizens have reminded, RangaDias is indeed controversial.
As mentioned earlier, in 2020, Dias announced that a new material composed of hydrogen-sulfur-carbon elements can achieve room-temperature superconductivity.
Although the pressure conditions are farther from practical application than the results given this time, as the "first room temperature superconductivity achievement", this research also caused a sensation in the academic community at the time and appeared on the cover of Nature.
However, in the two years since the paper was published, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the research. Other laboratories have tried repeatedly but have not been able to replicate the results.
On August 25, 2021, a core point of contention was brought to light: there was a problem with the magnetic susceptibility data of the paper.
To put it simply, the Dias team used a special method to remove background noise when processing the original data, but there was no reasonable explanation for this data processing method in the paper.
Jorge Hirsch, the theoretical physicist who proposed the h-index, directly questioned that Dias' team's use of polynomial curves to fit the data was "a fabrication" and "a scientific hoax."
At the end of 2022, this suspicion of fraud reached a climax: Nature directly ignored the collective protests of the nine authors and forcibly removed their cover articles.
However, this time, the temperature and pressure conditions under which superconductivity occurs have changed: at 133Gpa, the critical temperature of hydrogen-sulfur-carbon compounds is 260 K, which is about minus 13 °C.
But what is strange is that from the above figure, as the pressure continues to increase, the temperature value of the material to achieve superconductivity becomes lower again...
Unfortunately, Dias' sharing did not open up the live question session.
Dias' team was clearly not convinced by this result. Last month, they posted a new article on arXiv that retested the data that everyone was questioning.
In any case, let's first take a look at what this "nuclear bomb" contains.
How is this material made?
The team first measured a pair of data from a mixture of lutetium and hydrogen, and found that after adding a little nitrogen, the material achieved superconducting conditions
The required temperature values became higher, and finally this room-temperature superconducting material was synthesized.
The preparation of this room-temperature superconducting material is remarkable, but the team must also confirm that it really meets the criteria for superconductivity. In science, determining whether a material has superconducting properties often relies on two key effects.
First, there is complete diamagnetism, also known as the Meissner effect. This effect causes zero magnetic induction inside the superconductor, while the superconductor repels the magnetic field in the body. This feature not only contributes to the application of magnetic levitation technology, but also has important implications for other fields.
Secondly, there is the zero-resistance effect. This means that at a certain temperature, the DC resistance of the material suddenly drops to zero. This phenomenon is often used to confirm whether a material meets superconducting conditions.
However, in practical experiments, it is not easy to confirm these effects. First, because the composite sample is usually very small, the measurement results may be skewed.
Secondly, additional devices are required to measure the resistance value, which puts forward higher requirements for the accuracy of experimental measurements. Therefore, the research team not only needed to acquire the measurement data, but also process the data to determine whether the material achieved room temperature superconductivity conditions.
In this experiment, the team used a similar data processing method, using background subtraction to eliminate noisy background signals. They measured the material's superconducting temperature conditions at different pressures and showed that at a pressure of 1GPa, the material was able to superconduct at temperatures close to 21°C.
However, it is a puzzling phenomenon that as the pressure continues to increase, the temperature value at which the material achieves superconductivity decreases. This raises some questions and requires further research and interpretation.
While this time's finding has attracted widespread attention, academics remain cautious about the outcome due to the team's previous controversy and allegations of data fraud. Many scientists say these results need to be replicated by other independent research teams to confirm their reliability.
In conclusion, the discovery of room-temperature superconductivity caused an uproar in the physics community, and despite some controversy, it still represents a major breakthrough that could have profound implications for future scientific research and technology applications.