Room temp superconductor, or just very good conductor?

[TheVat]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301v1

Evidence for Near Ambient Superconductivity in the Lu-N-H System

Nilesh P. Salke, Alexander C. Mark, Muhtar Ahart, Russell J. Hemley

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The recent report of superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride at near-ambient pressures and temperatures has attracted great attention but also continuing controversy. Several experimental groups have reported no observation of superconductivity at these conditions in Lu-N-H samples they have prepared. To address this issue, we have carried out a series of studies of phases in the Lu-N-H system using a variety of techniques. We report here electrical resistance measurements on a Lu-N-H sample that are in very good agreement with both previously reported Tc and its pressure dependence in the vicinity of room temperature for nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride.

Comments:	11 pages, 7 figures
Subjects:	Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
Cite as:	arXiv:2306.06301 [cond-mat.supr-con]
	(or arXiv:2306.06301v1 [cond-mat.supr-con] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.06301 Focus to learn more

Submission history

From: Nilesh Salke [view email]
[v1] Fri, 9 Jun 2023 23:29:43 UTC (1,454 KB)

[mistermack]

I'm struggling to make sense of this. They are talking about superconductivity at ambient temperatures and pressures, but the pressures they display in the graphs are in the region of kbars.  Have I got the multiples wrong? I thought a kbar would be 1,000 bar which is hardly ambient in my book.

There's obviously something I'm not getting, but I can't see what it is.

[Mordred]

20 minutes ago, mistermack said:

I'm struggling to make sense of this. They are talking about superconductivity at ambient temperatures and pressures, but the pressures they display in the graphs are in the region of kbars.  Have I got the multiples wrong? I thought a kbar would be 1,000 bar which is hardly ambient in my book.

There's obviously something I'm not getting, but I can't see what it is.

No the article specifies super conductivity at room temperature under high pressure

[mistermack]

5 minutes ago, Mordred said:

No the article specifies super conductivity at room temperature under high pressure

Ah, I see there's a discrepancy between the extract quoted in the OP, and the actual linked article. In the OP it says near-ambient temperatures and pressures.

Correction : They are just unclear what they are trying to achieve. They start by talking about near-ambient temps and pressures, but then perform experiments at high pressures. It could have been made a bit clearer, (for the likes of me)

[CharonY]

41 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Ah, I see there's a discrepancy between the extract quoted in the OP, and the actual linked article. In the OP it says near-ambient temperatures and pressures.

Correction : They are just unclear what they are trying to achieve. They start by talking about near-ambient temps and pressures, but then perform experiments at high pressures. It could have been made a bit clearer, (for the likes of me)

I think your misunderstanding is in the first sentence the abstract. The authors say that an earlier report showed superconductivity at near-ambient pressures and temperatures but there apparently were disagreements whether the results were valid. So the authors are doing a more systematic analysis to resolve this controversy. In their own work they then describe resistance measurements in dependence on pressure at RT. Without reading the paper itself it suggest that they get similar resistance measurements as reported earlier, but likely only at high pressure.

[mistermack]

It's just a badly written summary. Very badly written. 

My own summary would be " The recent report of superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride at near-ambient pressures and temperatures has attracted great attention but also continuing controversy.  Here we present work done that bears very little relevance to those conditions. However, if you are interested in superconductivity under conditions of near-ambient temperatures but enormous pressures, read on ! "