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Oct 1, 2019

Researchers synthesize ‘impossible’ superconductor

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Researchers from the U.S., Russia, and China have bent the rules of classical chemistry and synthesized a “forbidden” compound of cerium and hydrogen—CeH9—which exhibits superconductivity at a relatively low pressure of 1 million atmospheres. The paper came out in Nature Communications.

Superconductors are materials capable of conducting an electric current with no resistance whatsoever. They are behind the powerful electromagnets in , maglev trains, MRI scanners, and could theoretically enable power lines that deliver electricity from A to B without losing the precious kilowatts to thermal dissipation.

Unfortunately, the superconductors known today can only work at very low temperatures (below −138 degrees Celsius), and latest record (−13 degrees Celsius) requires extremely high pressures of nearly 2 million atmospheres. This limits the scope of their possible applications and makes the available superconducting technologies expensive, since maintaining their fairly extreme operating conditions is challenging.

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  1. Gary Rodriguez says:

    Can’t get past the cerium and hydrogen –CeHg– when Hg is Mercury? So which way is it?