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Evidence for a superconducting gap emerges in hydrogen sulphides



Researchers in Germany report that they have directly measured a superconducting gap in a hydride sulphide material for the first time. The new finding represents “smoking gun” evidence for superconductivity in these materials, while also confirming that the electron pairing that causes it is mediated by phonons.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without resistance. Many materials behave this way when cooled below a certain transition temperature Tc, but in most cases this temperature is very low. For example, solid mercury, the first superconductor to be discovered, has a Tc of 4.2 K. Superconductors that operate at higher temperatures – perhaps even at room temperature – are thus highly desirable, as an ambient-temperature superconductor would dramatically increase the efficiency of electrical generators and transmission lines.

The rise of the superhydrides

The 1980s and 1990s saw considerable progress towards this goal thanks to the discovery of high-temperature copper oxide superconductors, which have Tcs between 30–133 K. Then, in 2015, the maximum known critical temperature rose even higher thanks to the discovery that a sulphide material, H3S, has a Tc of 203 K when compressed to pressures of 150 GPa.This result sparked a flurry of interest in solid materials containing hydrogen atoms bonded to other elements. In 2019, the record was broken again, this time by lanthanum decahydride (LaH10), which was found to have a Tc of 250–260 K, again at very high pressures.

A further advance occurred in 2021 with the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in cerium hydrides. These novel phases of CeH9 and another newly-synthesized material, CeH10, are remarkable in that they are stable and display high-temperature superconductivity at lower pressures (about 80 GPa, or 0.8 million atmospheres) than the other so-called “superhydrides

But how does it work?

One question left unanswered amid these advances concerned the mechanism for superhydride superconductivity. According to the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory of “conventional” superconductivity, superconductivity occurs when electrons overcome their mutual electrical repulsion to form pairs. These electron pairs, which are known as Cooper pairs, can then travel unhindered through the material as a supercurrent without scattering off phonons (quasiparticles arising from vibrations of the material’s crystal lattice) or other impurities.

Cooper pairing is characterized by a tell-tale energy gap near what’s known as the Fermi level, which is the highest energy level that electrons can occupy in a solid at a temperature of absolute zero. This gap is equivalent to the maximum energy required to break up a Cooper pair of electrons, and spotting it is regarded as unambiguous proof of that material’s superconducting nature.

For the superhydrides, however, this is easier said than done, because measuring such a gap requires instruments that can withstand the extremely high pressures required for superhydrides to exist and behave as superconductors. Traditional techniques such as scanning tunnelling spectroscopy or angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy do not work, and there was little consensus on what might take their place.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.



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