Nickel Oxide Material Made with 'Jenga Chemistry' Shows Superconductivity - A First

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University  have made the first nickel oxide material that shows clear signs of superconductivity, which is the ability to transmit electrical current with no loss. Also known as a nickelate, it’s the first in a potential new family of unconventional superconductors that’s very similar to copper oxides, or cuprates. This discovery could help crack the mystery of how high-temperature superconductors work. To create the new type of superconducting material, the scientists first made a thin film of a common material known as perovskite, “doped” it with strontium, and then exposed it to a chemical that yanked out a layer of oxygen atoms, much like removing a stick from a tower of Jenga blocks. This made the film flip into a different atomic structure known as a nickelate. Tests showed that this nickelate can conduct electricity with no resistance.

Transcript

00:00:01 Harold Y. Hwang and Danfeng (Denver) Li recently discovered that nickelate is indeed super conductive when asked by Harold's 9 year old daughter how did you uncover this and how does it work? Harold went on to explain that it's kind of like removing a layer from a Jenga tower here is Denver explaining the experiment you know when you play Jenga games you need to be very careful about pulling out these blocks right so in real experiments we also used a very gentle way which we call it soft chemistry that is a process which allows us to take oxygen blocks out

00:00:46 by removing these oxygen blocks among other steps Denver and his team had created a thin film of nickelate and it was in these strips that Denver made the discovery that the material was superconducting this is the first in a new family of superconductors that will help scientists like Harold and Denver figure out how they work