![]() ![]() They started by making a common material known as perovskite. ![]() The defects, which are a bit like misaligned zipper teeth, arise from the same innovative process that allowed Hwang's team to create and stabilize a nickelate film in the first place. It means we can finally address the underlying physics behind these materials and behind unconventional superconductivity in general." "So eliminating the defects is a significant breakthrough. "These quality issues have led to many debates and open questions about nickelate properties, with research groups reporting widely varying results," Lee said. "Nickelate films are really unstable, and until now our efforts to stabilize them on top of other materials have produced defects that are like speed bumps for electrons," said Kyuho Lee, a SIMES postdoctoral researcher who contributed to the discovery of superconductivity in nickelates four years ago and has been working on them ever since. The research team, led by Harold Hwang, director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC, described their work today in the journal Nature. It's the latest step in a 35-year quest to develop superconductors that can operate at close to room temperature, which would revolutionize electronics, transportation, power transmission and other technologies by allowing them to operate without energy-wasting electrical resistance. Those striking similarities, they said, may mean these two very different materials achieve superconductivity in much the same way. For instance, when the nickelate is tweaked to optimize its superconductivity and then heated above its superconducting temperature, its resistance to the flow of electric current increases in a linear fashion, just as in cuprates. Their first look at a superconducting nickel oxide, or nickelate, that does not have defects revealed that it is more like the cuprates - which hold the world's high-temperature record for unconventional superconductivity at normal pressures - than previously thought. Not only does this improve the material's ability to conduct electricity with no loss, they said, but it also allows them to discover its true nature and properties, both in and out of the superconducting state, for the first time. ![]()
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