Superconductors are the material which does not have any resistance.
This idea, superconductors, was discovered way back in 1911.
But all these years,
we were always stuck to these very, very, very low temperatures.
But then, for the last six, seven years, we start to see very much
like increasing in these transition temperatures,
getting close to the room temperature.
But there's a caveat.
This happened at very, very high pressures,
until now.
If we had zero resistance conductors,
we could have trains that could be levitated and transit
people from one corner of the country to the other with almost no power.
It would completely change the way electric cars work.
Magnetic resonance imaging is quite expensive.
That would tremendously change, also.
Even fusion could potentially be dramatically changed,
our quest for fusion.
We sort of imagine that this could be
a real revolution in technology.
The new discovery is the first time
we are demonstrating a material
that superconducts at room temperature
and near-ambient pressure.
Before, the pressure was 270 gigapascals.
The new discovery,
now we are at one gigapascal.
From 270 to 1 gigapascal.
We don't need the diamond anvil cell now.
There are different other ways to mimic these pressures by using
strain engineering, or various different techniques.
So that's why we are very excited
that this is now in the region that we can easily access,
in terms of pressure and in terms of temperature.
There are both worldwide implications and certainly implications for our community.
We envision the clear possibility of making Rochester
a center for everything that is related to superconductivity.
We are gradually stepping from
fundamental research into the engineering, and with the engineering
will come, obviously, the industrial applications.
So I think this will bring us as close as possible to the realization
of what we consider the holy grail of superconductivity,
having superconductivity at room temperature, at conditions that can be
then transferred into an industrial production,
industrial applications.
So these kind of huge claims need a careful, thorough examination.
So because of that, it went through a rigorous review process,
multiple referees, multiple rounds, and we made all the data and everything
that we discussed in the paper, our methods and everything very open
so everybody can take a look at it and go through it and really make sure
that they come to the same conclusion.
I’ve never seen a material transform color like this.
So it's a blue color.
So you put it in the diamond anvil cell, you squeeze it.
This blue turns into a very bright pink color.
And then you squeeze further and it becomes bright red.
I was joking with my students
that we're going to call it red matter because of the movie Star Trek.
Oh, this is Reddmatter.
One of the things I find really exciting
about this work is that it involved
not only faculty at the University of Rochester,
but also graduate students and undergraduate students
took part in this research.
I work with the testing of the materials,
so I use the diamond anvil cells
to test spectroscopy to see how
the properties change with pressure.
Everyone in my group,
not just one single student, every graduate student, every postdoc,
every undergraduate student, everybody just put into this project.
It's the success of a team.
Credit to them, so this belongs to them.
Machine learning can be applied to almost anything.
When you apply it to superconductors, it's about collecting the data
that revolves around what predicts a superconductor.
What I've been doing is trying to create a machine learning
model that's going to take in a lot of data
that has already been found about superconductors
and use it as a platform to make more predictions about what
can be superconductors and just help make everything a lot more efficient.
We need to be able to scale this up so we have large-scale
materials that also exhibit superconducting properties.
We have to think about how do you manufacture these materials?
How do you make them commercially viable and usable
so that we can achieve some of the promise that this discovery holds?
That's what we're about at the Hajim School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences and at the University of Rochester.
It's really why we are a research institution is to find
these new discoveries, to build new machines, to develop
new tools to help humanity move forward.
There’s a lot to be done.
This is just a first step in the very beginning.
The starting point for many,
many discoveries to come.