Ultra-Low Superconductivity at Room Temperature Again Reported

Jones Beene on the Vortex-l mailing list has reported about a revised paper by a team of Indian researchers who claim they have been able to achieve superconductivity at room temperatures.

10 months ago scientists Anshu Pandey and Dev Kumar Thapa at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, first reported the achievement, but were met with significant skepticism from fellow scientists who pointed out flaws in their report. Now they have run further experiments, and added more researchers to their team, and report similar results.

Their paper, titled “Coexistence of Diamagnetism and Vanishingly Small Electrical Resistance at Ambient Temperature and Pressure in Nanostructures” has been published on Arxiv.org here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08572v2

A review of the new results has been published at the Indian website The Wire here: https://thewire.in/the-sciences/iisc-room-temperature-superconductor-gold-silver-magnetic-susceptibility Some reviewers of the paper are still finding reasons to be skeptical, but the revised paper is considered an improvement on the first report.

Here is an excerpt:

The significant part of the new paper, posted on May 21 on the arXiv preprint server – as compared to the earlier one in July 2018, which prompted so much controversy and doubt – is that the scientists report they have observed the material’s resistance drop to micro-ohms, which is 100x lower than before. They have also provided a description of protocols used to prepare the gold-silver nanostructured samples and details of the electrical and magnetic measurements. This should allow other research groups to try and reproduce this extraordinary claim of a room-temperature superconductor.