Research collaborators from Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory created a superconductive nickel oxide that has the capacity of electrical current transmission with no loss.
The new compound nickelate, is similar to cuprates, copper oxides, who belong to unconventional superconductors that can work at room temperature. The similarities between nickelates and cuprates give scientists the idea that the former might also superconduct at relatively high temperatures.
However, there are fundamental differences such as nickelates not containing the type of magnetism that superconducting cuprates posses. This produces a shadow of doubt regarding the theories on how unconventional superconductors function.
Danfeng Li of the Standford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC was the lead author, who also published his work in the journal Nature.
"This is a very important discovery that requires us to rethink the details of the electronic structure and possible mechanisms of superconductivity in these materials," said George Sawatzky, a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary that accompanied the paper in Nature. "This is going to cause an awful lot of people to jump into investigating this new class of materials, and all sorts of experimental and theoretical work will be done."
It was difficult to create the nickelates that had an atomic structure conducive to superconductivity.
"As far as we know, the nickelate we were trying to make is not stable at the very high temperatures-about 600 degrees Celsius-where these materials are normally grown," Li said. "So we needed to start out with something we can stably grow at high temperatures and then transform it at lower temperatures into the form we wanted."
"He started with a perovskite-a material defined by its unique, double-pyramid atomic structure-that contained neodymium, nickel and oxygen. Then he doped the perovskite by adding strontium; this is a common process that adds chemicals to a material to make more of its electrons flow freely," according to Phys.
