Chinese-led research team raises doubts about US ‘room temperature’ superconductor
- Researchers ‘failed to even remotely replicate the results’ of superconductivity claimed by US team
- If results could be reproduced, it would be a revolution, Chinese scientist says
The results from a Chinese-led experiment have raised questions about a US research team’s claims to have created a superconducting material at room temperature, a scientific holy grail.
In a paper posted on the preprint server arXiv on Thursday, researchers from Beijing and the US state of Illinois reported that they were only able to achieve superconductivity in their experiment at -203 degrees Celsius (-333 Fahrenheit).
A pressure of 218 gigapascals was also required to reach that state. One gigapascal is equal to the pressure of 10,000 Earth atmospheres.
The results – which have not been peer reviewed and used a synthesised compound known as Lu4H23 – came a day after a University of Rochester team claimed in the journal Nature that they had been able to make a crystal superconductor at under just 1 gigapascal at 21 degrees Celsius, a pressure and temperature suitable for practical applications.
“In this preliminary test of the Nature paper, Chinese and US researchers obviously failed to even remotely replicate the results,” he said.