Credit: Adam Fenster

What is superconductivity  ??

Before taking you to the scientific journey of  “SUPERCONDUCTIVITY”, let's imagine a simple case:

Let there be a crowd of people(=40) in a small room of dimension( 10 meters by 8 meters). Now there is an announcement that there is a bomb planted in the room. Due to this, there was a rush in the room and people started colliding with each other.

Now is it possible somehow that people keep on moving inside the room and on the other hand, they don’t suffer any collision.??  

And common sense says no.

 But wait, there can be one way out. Why not glue everyone inside the room so that they stuck together and then move together!!  . So we found a way to avoid collisions.

Let's apply the same principle for electrons.

Now we aim to avoid collisions in electrons somehow.

So here also if we can coalesce electrons somehow, then we can avoid loss of energy due to collisions. The Same phenomenon is called superconductivity.

This can be done in two ways: first by decreasing temperature and second by increasing pressure.

If we somehow manage both these effects we achieve our aim. So until now, various compounds have been developed which show this property of superconductivity. 


The Latest Advancement …

The latest research published in the journal ‘NATURE’ says that a compound of carbon, hydrogen and sulphur (carbonaceous sulphur hydride: don’t bother much about the name. ) has been observed to show superconductivity approximately at room temp. i.e “at 15 degrees Celcius”). It is a major advancement in the field of experimental science. But the second factor(pressure) as mentioned above is equally important and here we require a pressure of about 2 million atmospheric pressure which was achieved by diamond anvil in the laboratory. The requirement of very high pressure makes it difficult to use for application purposes….

Despite its less application use, for now, it is a major discovery in the field of SUPERCONDUCTIVITY.  

    

The superconductivity laboratory at the University of Rochester, New York.Credit: Adam Fenster



This is the diamond anvil  (blue box) which  was used to produce

the high pressure of 2.6 million atmospheres.