IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology
Gold and silver nanostructures claimed to have room temperature superconductivity
• https://www.nextbigfuture.com, brian wangDespite being a low temperature phenomenon till date, superconductivity has found numerous applications in diverse fields of medicine, science and engineering. The great scientific interest in the phenomenon as well as its practical utility has motivated extensive efforts to discover and understand new superconductors. We report the observation of superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure conditions in films and pellets of a nanostructured material that is composed of silver particles embedded into a gold matrix. Specifically, we observe that upon cooling below 236 K at ambient pressures, the resistance of sample films drops below 10-4 Ohm, being limited by instrument sensitivity. Further, below the transition temperature, samples become strongly diamagnetic, with volume susceptibilities as low as -0.056. We further describe methods to tune the transition to temperatures higher than room temperature.
Superconductivity was observed -123°C for applied fields of three to five Tesla.