Superconductivity record sparks wave of follow-up physics

Safety procedure when working around sour gas wells (natural gas with H2S) is that, if you see somebody drop in front of you, you do not touch him, approach him, or anything else. You just get the hell outta there. If he's been dropped by H2S, trying to move him is just going to cause you to go down too. Besides being bloody lethal, H2S is notorious for being corrosive. H2S forms metal sulfides with any exposed metal it can access, and the hydrogen byproduct often diffuses through the metal and forms expanding holidays in positions of stress, potentially to the point that the metal will crack.

I've worked around high power free-space infrared lasers where a single stray reflection could instantly blind you permanently (and you can't see infrared light scattering off of stuff like you can with visible lasers). I'd rather spend years working with those than spend one afternoon in a lab with a sample of H2S at 140 GPa. I don't care if it's inside a diamond anvil cell inside a cryostat. High pressure H2S has got to be a freakin' nightmare to work with. I'm sure H2S has lots of funky properties nobody knows about because practically nobody wants to work with the stuff. Kudos to the PI who convinced a bunch of grad student peons to put their lives on the line... I suppose.

"it becomes odorless (by paralyzing your sense of smell) right around when you need to start getting worried"

I don't know if this is still the case in this litigation-happy age (probably not), but when I was in high school it was a common beginner's chem class experiment to make small quantities of H2S.

My physics teacher once commented that he hated it when they did that, because he'd smell it for a while, then not smell it any more -- leaving him to wonder whether it'd just gone away, or whether people were going to start keeling over.

Thanks, my Google-fu was weak and kept getting me pages on unit conversion. :)

Wow, that should not be understated!

but still... 203K!? i remember the 90s when the last round of leap frogging superconductor materials were being developed - every conference even vaguely related to solid state chem/physics seemed to set a new record. And H2S? it's hardly an exotic material. maybe it's just the (near dead) chemist in me geeking out ;-)

That is not that high ... after all we need a pipe only couple of microns thick.

Actually in thermodynamic terms temperature is a measure of how entropy (disorder) increases when you increase internal energy. Not the most intuitive definition (you can't just go and buy entropyometer for example ;)) but it works even when quantum effects kick in. And for ideal gas this measure happens to be proportional to the kinetic energy of the particles.

This is a really interesting framing. If it's the correct way to think about things, it would really put a damper on the importance of warm-temperatures/extreme-pressure superconductors.

The big application for superconductors is wire, and it's much harder to compress a wire to a million atm than it is to cool it to -70 C. However, this result is important (if independently replicated) because it demonstrates that the established theory of low temperature superconductivity [1] has predictive power all the way up to these high temperatures and likely to room temperature, providing new motivation for theoretical chemists to dream up new materials that the theory predicts would superconduct under more accessible conditions. Practical room temperature superconductors would, in my opinion, change the world as much as the development of semiconductors.

[1] a modified version of BCS Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory

The reason why this is so important is that simpler molecules are much easier to simulate and work with from the theoretical side to create a bulletproof model of how the high temperature superconductors work. All of the cooper pairs and all that stuff took years and years to figure out because the molecule was something like yttrium barium copper oxide.. which is complicated as all hell to figure out what the electrons are doing inside of it while in a crystalline form.. H2S is basically like "sulfur plus some protons" is so much more simple to simulate with something like molecular dynamics methods to figure out what is going on with it. What the researchers probably are hoping to come out of this is a recipe for superconductivity based upon a crystalline form of some material that can be made in a low-cost fashion that superconducts at high temp..

Maintaining a low temperature requires continuous work as you can't stop heat transfer completely. This consumes energy and requires some machinery to produce or deliver the coolant.

Establishing and maintaining a high pressure on the other hand is a one time effort, for example screwing back the front of a ballpoint pen puts the spring inside under permanent pressure, and even gases can be contained at high pressure with no significant loss.

If I'm reading this right, it gets up to ~600K by the time it hits the right pressure for Neptune.

http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2005/03/aa1695/aa1695....

Depends on how many sweaters you have.

Well I'm not aware of any commonly accepted current theories of super conductivity that say a room temperature one is necessarily impossible, so I suppose implicitly yes.

You may be killed. H2S is very toxic.