The long-awaited goal of finding a superconductor that works at room temperature has been achieved. According to researchers, this offers prospects for future applications in personal electronics and other technologies.
Room temperature superconductors will change everything
Scientists say they have created a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at 58 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a paper published last week. If confirmed, the new material could be a major advance over previous findings that found superconductivity only at temperatures well below zero degrees. While hurdles remain, the discovery could lead to exotic new technologies, experts say.
"It's possible that superconductors could revolutionize transportation with levitation and a superconducting lattice," Ashkan Salamat, a co-author of the paper and a condensed matter physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in a telephone interview. "We can miniaturize devices, and we can think about miniaturizing batteries or eliminating batteries altogether. The blue sky thinking is endless."
Potential applications for this kind of material are nearly endless. Superconducting circuits at room temperature "wouldn't lose energy and wouldn't need to be charged," Shanti Deemyad, a physics professor at the University of Utah, said in an email interview. "Plus, we could use them to make superconducting logic circuits that are much faster than what we have now."
