Superconductors allow electricity to move without any resistance, which means no energy is wasted as heat. We already use them for things like MRI scanners and mag-lev trains. However, these materials have to be kept hundreds of degrees below zero to work. That cooling process is expensive and bulky, which is why you don’t see superconductors in your everyday electronics.

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and their partners are working on a way to change that. They’ve been looking into “superhydrides,” a class of materials that can work at much warmer temperatures, around 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

High-Temperature Superconductors

The challenge with superhydrides is that they usually need extreme pressure to work. In 2018, researchers found a version that worked at 8 degrees Fahrenheit, but it required the kind of pressure you’d find deep inside the Earth. Looking for a solution, the team tried mixing in yttrium to make the material more stable at lower pressures.

To test this, they used a device that squeezed a tiny sample between two diamonds.

“To reach these extreme pressures, we squeezed a tiny sample between two diamonds,” said Maddury Somayazulu, a physicist at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Using the high-energy X-rays from the recently upgraded APS, the team could see exactly how the atoms were behaving inside that tiny, pressurized space.

Vitali Prakapenka, a research professor at the University of Chicago, explained, “We focused an intense X-ray beam onto a sample only a few micrometers thick and about ten to twenty micrometers across.” For context, that’s much thinner than a human hair.

Changing How Electronics Work

Even though the pressure used in these tests is still very high, the team sees this as a stepping stone. They compare it to how we learned to make synthetic diamonds. At first, we could only make them under extreme conditions, but over time, we found ways to produce them more easily.

“These experiments show what the upgraded APS can do,” Somayazulu said. “We can now study atomic-level structures with unprecedented detail in materials under extreme pressure.”

The goal is to eventually find a material that works at room temperature and normal pressure. If that happens, it could completely change how our power grids and electronics work.

Prakapenka added, “If we understand the physics well enough, we may be able to stabilize these structures at much lower pressures but still attain superconductivity close to room temperature.”