3 ms·
Bulk metals could get into the vicinity of the pressure requirements, but I suppose first applications would be e.g. microwave components that can be fabricated
by ThePhysicist 4y ago
Bulk metals could get into the vicinity of the pressure requirements, but I suppose first applications would be e.g. microwave components that can be fabricated small enough to fit into a diamond anvil cell (think e.g. of lossless inductors or Josephson junctions for high-frequency components). Also, cooling the material might reduce the required pressure significantly, and cooling to e.g. -100 °C is not very expensive and can be done with semiconductor components, so having a superconductor in that range should already open many applications. That said there are some cuprate superconductors that come close to that temperature range already (without needing pressurization) and they still haven't been commercialized widely as the fabrication process is quite involved (e.g. chemical vapor deposition of single atomic layers) and the resulting material (a ceramic) is extremely brittle, so it wouldn't survive long in most environments where semiconductors are used e.g. due to vibration. So whether this will be a commercial success also depends on the material properties. Lutetium hydride has probably better properties than cuprate semiconductors already, but again proving superconductivity is only the beginning, it can be a long way before this becomes commercially viable (if that happens at all).