Materials

"Reddmatter" shows evidence of room temperature superconductivity

A tiny lump of lutetium hydride, a new material that a team of scientists claim can be a superconductor at room temperature under relatively low pressure
A tiny lump of lutetium hydride, a new material that a team of scientists claim can be a superconductor at room temperature under relatively low pressure
University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster

Scientists at the University of Rochester claim to have created a material that acts as a superconductor at room temperature and lower pressures than ever before. If confirmed, this “reddmatter,” as they call it, could mark a major breakthrough.

Even if a material is a good conductor of electricity, it will still encounter some resistance that affects efficiency. But in superconductors, electrons can flow freely with zero resistance, which could theoretically provide major advantages in energy grids, electric vehicles, quantum computers and even high-speed maglev trains.

But of course, there’s a catch: superconductivity only really works at temperatures close to absolute zero, which makes it prohibitive for widespread real-world use. In recent years, scientists have found that some materials can work as superconductors at higher temperatures, but only if you apply very high pressures, which brings its own challenges to scaling up the tech.

In the new study, the Rochester scientists claim to have created a material that works as a superconductor at room temperature and relatively low pressure. The material is a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH), and it demonstrates superconductivity at a balmy 20.9 °C (69.5 °F) at 145,000 psi of pressure. The latter figure may sound high, but it’s about two orders of magnitude lower than has been needed in other experiments, and falls within the range used in some manufacturing techniques.

The team started with the element lutetium, combined with hydrogen to form a hydride, giving the material properties that made it a promising candidate for room temperature superconductivity. It was then doped with nitrogen to make it more stable, allowing it to work under lower pressure.

In the beginning the material was a lustrous blue color, but as it was compressed in a diamond anvil it shifted to pink when it became superconductive, and finally a bright red when it moved beyond superconducting into a metallic state. Because of this, the team started jokingly calling it reddmatter, in a reference to Star Trek.

Room-temperature superconductivity would be a massive scientific breakthrough, allowing for advances like efficient power grids that can transmit electricity without losses, high-speed, energy-efficient levitating trains, and faster, smaller and more efficient computers and medical imaging technologies. It could even be the key to tokamak reactors that bust open fusion energy.

Before we get too carried away, however, it’s worth remembering that this research still needs plenty of work, not least of which is having the results verified and reproduced by independent scientists. After all, this same team made some bold claims about room temperature superconductivity in 2020, in a paper that was later retracted by Nature after other scientists raised concerns with the data processing techniques used.

To the team’s credit, the data on the new study was collected while independent scientists looked on, and the original paper has also been resubmitted with new data. Future work will continue to explore the material’s superconductivity to better understand how it works and how it might be used.

The study was published in the journal Nature, and the team describes the work in the video below.

Source: University of Rochester

6 comments
madsci
Wonder how easy it is to achieve the relatively low pressure of 145,000 psi? Seems like quite a bit to me.
Karmudjun
An exciting breakthrough Michael, nicely written and informative. As the video of the researchers discussing the significance - this is but an incremental step in the process - who knows how much longer we must work for Nuclear Fusion on Earth to become a reality? Is it still 30 years in the future? But with this doped Lutetium hydride or Reddmatter, maybe we are 28 years away from functional energy producing fusion reactors on Earth!
EJ222
Lutetium is very expensive and very hard to mine, so its not gonna be cheap/plentiful if this pans out.
MikeRyanc95317ae2315443b
Nicely written to the point of getting me motivated to check out what lutetium is. Something I did learn was that the current global production is around 10 tonnes annually, and this stuff has a price tag for a kilogram of approximately $10,000USD. So if this works, the next thing will be to somehow ramp up mining and lower the price tag of this material.
stevendkaplan
@madsci it actually isn’t that high. Many computer chips have components that are manufactured and held together by molecular strain that are in excess of what this requires.
robert36
I have a question: can a superconductor circuit electrons travel in one direction in a circuit, and by changing the orientation of a second superconducting circuit have the electrons traveling in the opposite direction thus produce a kind of alternating circuit?