On 16 January, in the American scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” an article was published, co-authored by scientists from the University of Warsaw under the leadership of Professor Wojciech Grochala from the Centre for New Technologies of the University of Warsaw. Researchers presented a new proposal of superconductive materials at ambient temperature.
Superconductors are electrically conductive materials without loss when cooled to very low temperatures. They are nowadays used in many applications. The widespread use of superconductors is hampered by the high costs associated with cooling. Since their discovery in 1911, there has been a search for materials that can superconduct at ambient temperature. The current temperature record is -140 ℃ (minus) under atmospheric pressure – this is what copper oxides show – as you can see, there is still a long way to go to create a superconductor operating at room temperatures.
Now a team of researchers from the University of Warsaw, headed by Professor Wojciech Grochala and an international team from Poland, Great Britain, Slovenia, Italy, USA and Slovakia, has proposed a new candidate. Researchers claim that replacing copper with silver and oxygen with fluorine causes the preservation of many similarities to copper materials, and can potentially increase the working temperature of the material.
The results of the study were published in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”.
Among the authors of the article were scientists from the Centre for New Technologies of the University of Warsaw (Prof. Wojciech Grochala – head of the scientific team from the University of Warsaw, Dr. Subrahmanyam Bandaru, Dr. Mariana Derzsi, Jakub Gawraczyński, Dr. Tomasz Jaroń, Dr. Dominik Kurzydłowski, Dr. Piotr J. Leszczyński), Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Warsaw (Prof. Wojciech Gadomski) and Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw (Dr. Krzysztof Wohlfeld).
The text of the publication is available on the PNAS website.
Congratulations to our scientists!
