Engineers find new candidate for high-temperature superconductors

American and Spanish engineers have found a nickel oxide compound that, according to their calculations, could potentially retain the properties of a superconductor at high temperatures. The study can be found in the journal Nature Physics.

Superconductors – materials capable of conducting electric current at a certain temperature with practically no loss (with zero resistance) – have been known since the beginning of the 20th century, but these were low-temperature superconductors requiring cooling to several tens of kelvin, which severely limits their practical application. Scientists later discovered that some copper oxide compounds acquire superconducting properties at higher temperatures, but what exactly distinguishes these substances from others remains unknown.

In their work, the authors of the article considered nickel oxides, the crystals of which are similar to those of copper oxides. Many of them are not superconductors, and some are not even metals, but the researchers managed to create a compound consisting of three layers of nickel oxide, separated by layers of praseodymium oxide.

According to the head of work, deputy director of the department of materials science at Argonne National Laboratory, John Mitchell, the compound found by his group is not a superconductor, but it can potentially become one, you just need to select the desired concentration of electrons.

While scientists are not sure that they will be able to create such a material, now they have only individual crystals a few millimeters in size. Using X-ray absorption spectroscopy, the authors of the work confirmed that the electronic configuration of these crystals is similar to the structure of copper oxid

es. Source: indicator.ru