Some combination of Hydrogen, Sulfur and Carbon has reached superconductivity at 60 F
- Not exactly sure what the substance is
- Needs ~2 million atmospheres of pressure
Brian
That seems…impractical.
Weird. I wonder why the pressure matters?
Gas giant cores are a place I’d think you could have those conditions in Nature, 200 GPa and 300K sound possible there. If so, how does superconductivity affect their chemistry, if at all?
While it is speculative without knowing more about the actual material that is going superconducting (there are no measurements of the chemical or crystallographic structure of this material at pressure), we know that superconductivity is the pairing of electrons mediated by interactions with the lattice. One way to change the lattice to make it more conducive to the exact mediation needed is to apply pressure, changing bond distances and distorting the lattice structure.
It’s not a completely new direction in new superconductors. Researchers have been applying pressure to modify Tc and other superconducting properties since forever (or, in my experience, the 70’s). In fact, the discovery of the 90 Kelvin superconductor, YBCO (Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide), was by a researcher (Paul Chu) who had spent his PhD exploring superconductivity under pressure. He theorized that he could replicate the effects of pressure by substituting some larger atoms in a standard perovskite lattice (the larger atoms change the bond length and distort the lattice). It worked.