The good news: German physicists may have produced a room-temperature superconductor.
The bad news: the conditions they’ve used may not be a great improvement.
Chemists Mikhail Eremets and Ivan Troyan [Ed.: of the Max Planck Institute] sandwiched hydrogen between two diamonds and compressed it while carefully monitoring the atoms with a set of lasers and electrodes. To apply the pressure, they used a diamond anvil, which is similar to the machines that crush coal with so much force that it turns into artificial diamonds.
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The hydrogen atoms become electrically conductive when they are under about 220 gigapascals of pressure, explained Mikhail Eremets and Ivan Troyan in a report to the journal Nature Materials. That’s very similar to the pressure that you would experience within the inner layers of Saturn or the mantle of Jupiter, and ten times higher pressure than what’s found at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
That hydrogen has a non-gaseous state that is a metal is no surprise. We’ve known that for a century (look at its position in the periodic table). Producing the metal is quite an achievement, however, particularly at room temperature. Previous experiments along these lines have utilized extremely low temperatures.
To fill in some of the blanks here it is known that certain materials conduct electricity at some temperature with zero electrical resistance. Electrical resistance can be thought of as being like friction in mechanics.
The very cold or even ultra-cold temperatures required for the demonstrated superconductors is expensive to maintain. If a superconductor could be produced that functioned at what’s blithely referred to as “room temperature” which, oddly, in this field actually means a temperature of 0°C which is a mite cold for an actual room, all kinds of things become practical that aren’t practical now. It would be revolutionary for power transmission, for example. Other applications would be in computing and efficient MRIs just to name two.
If economically feasible, a room-temperature superconductor would be an economic miracle.
Finally, something useful to do with my diamond anvil!