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IISc duo’s claim of ambient superconductivity may have support in theory
Why is it in news?
- In July, a two member team of chemists, Anshu Pandey and Devesh Kumar Thapa, posted a preprint on the arXiv server claiming to have observed superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure in samples in their lab in the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
- They had studied materials with silver nanoparticles embedded in a gold matrix and found that their samples showed the signs of becoming a superconductor on cooling below 236 K (-37 degrees Celsius).
- Further, when they altered the mole fraction of gold in the samples, they could bring up the critical temperature Tc (the temperature at which the transition to superconductivity happens) up to room temperature.
Findings
- They found the two effects that are the considered the signatures of superconductivity — resistance dropping close to zero below the critical temperature and the expulsion of magnetic flux from within the material — which often shows up as magnetic levitation at the superconducting temperature.
- The possible applications of such a discovery are unimaginably vast — a material that conducts electricity without resistance, or loss of power at room temperature.
- Magnetic levitation has also been discussed in the context of mag-lev trains etc.
Source
The Hindu