By Stacey Liberatore Dailymail.com
Updated 15 August 2023 17:23, 15 August 2023 17:24
Scientists have discovered a ‘devil particle’ that could lead to the ‘holy grail’ of physics, superconductors that conduct electricity at room temperature.
A superconductor is a specific metal or alloy that can conduct electricity without resistance, but must be above 100°F below freezing to work.
Researchers at the University of Illinois recently identified particles in strontium ruthenate metal that have no mass, particles that can form at any temperature. It’s been almost 70 years since the “devil” was first prophesied.
Superconductors are used in operations such as levitation trains and high-precision magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, but materials that operate at room temperature will pave the way for more powerful computers.
Superconductivity was discovered over 100 years ago in mercury cooled to the temperature of liquid helium (minus 452°F).
Following the discovery of superconductivity in mercury, this phenomenon was also observed in other materials at very low temperatures.
Materials included several metals and alloys of niobium and titanium that could easily be made into wire.
This devil particle was first predicted in 1956 by theoretical physicist David Pines, who believed that electrons would have “strange” reactions as they moved through solids.
Electrons can lose their identities in solids because electrical interactions combine them to form collective units.
With sufficient energy, electrons can form composite particles called plasmons with new charges and masses determined by the underlying electrical interactions.
However, the mass is usually so large that the energies available at room temperature cannot form plasmons. But there are exceptions to this, Pines theorized.
Physicists believe that if a solid has electrons in multiple energy bands, as in many metals, each plasmon will combine in an out-of-phase pattern to form a new massless, neutral plasmon, the devil. argued that it could form
Demons have no mass, so they can form with any energy and exist at any temperature.
This has led to the speculation that they may have an intrinsic influence on the behavior of multiband metals.
The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Peter Abamonte, professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who identified the Pines prediction while studying the metal strontium ruthenate.
Although this experiment had nothing to do with superconductors, this metal resembles a high-temperature superconductor rather than a high-temperature superconductor.
Researchers had first explored the electronic properties of metals by bombarding them with electrons, which summoned the devil in the metal’s features.
Abamonte, who worked on the project with former graduate student Ali Hussein, said: “At first, I had no idea what it was.
The devil is not mainstream. That possibility surfaced early on, but we basically laughed it off.
“But when I started to eliminate things, I began to doubt that I really had found the devil.”
Moore postdoctoral fellow at UIUC and condensed matter theorist Edwin Huang was eventually asked to calculate the electronic structure features of strontium ruthenate.
“The Pines’ prediction of demons required very specific conditions, and it was not clear to anyone whether demons should be present in strontium ruthenate,” Huang said.
“We had to perform microscopic calculations to find out what was going on. When we did this, we found that the oscillations were about the same magnitude but out of phase, as Pines described. We found a particle consisting of two electronic bands that