Harvard scientists have made a significant advance in high-pressure physics by creating a tool that directly images superconducting materials under extreme conditions, facilitating new discoveries in the field of superconducting hydrides.
Hydrogen (like many of us) acts weird under pressure. Theory predicts that when crushed by the weight of more than a million times our atmosphere, this light, abundant, normally gaseous element first becomes a metal, and even more strangely, a superconductor – a material that conducts electricity with no resistance.
Scientists have been eager to understand and eventually harness superconducting hydrogen-rich compounds, called hydrides, for practical applications – from levitating trains to particle detectors. But studying the behavior of these and other materials under enormous, sustained pressures is anything but practical, and accurately measuring those behaviors ranges somewhere between a nightmare and impossible.
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