Self-Assembling Plastic could be the next superconducting material

New research from Cornell University brings the worlds of soft-materials science with futuristic physics. Cornell University researchers have a brand new superconducting material on their hands that is soft like a plastic bottle. It is designed to self-assemble like tiny microorganisms known as diatoms, creating, to quote one of its inventors, a "beautiful structure" that also happens to contain unique superconducting capabilities. The research, published today in Science Advances, points the way toward a massively scalable superconductor that allows for greater control over how the material moves the magnetic fields of energy that passes through it. Superconductors are a class of materials that move electron energy through them without resistance. But, as co-author and Cornell grad student Peter A. Beaucage points out, "there's a property that defines them better but is lesser known, which is that they totally push out magnetic fields." The plastic nanostructures have a number of pores throughout them, ones the researchers believe they'll someday be able to take advantage of. "We can actually direct where the magnetic field from the material into these pores," Beaucage says. The polymer is made from niobium oxide, which is exposed to about 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled, then exposed to an ammonia environment burning at 1562 degrees Fahrenheit. Somewhere in this process—and the process must be followed very carefully to achieve superconductivity—it becomes the superconducting compound niobium nitride. "There's something that happens to the material when we heat the material to 700 and then cool it and heat it to 850 again is different than direct heating it to 850, and whatever that is isn't clear to us," Ulrich Wiesner, a Cornell professor in materials science and engineering and another co-author on the paper, said. Some of the more novel properties have yet to be explored as the researchers figure out quite what they're working with and what it's capable of. Thus far, it isn't quite at the holy grail of superconductors in which the can operate at room temperatures. But because its structure allows for easier integration, it may be compounded with other structures to create unseen kinds of superconductivity. It also opens the door for cheaper superconductors, as the process is straight out of the world of polymer material science with the world of physics, arenas that don't have much crossover. "In principle, the ease of processing polymers is now brought to making superconductors," Wiesner says. "The techniques we're using are all developed through the polymer industry, which works on the ton scale," Beaucage added.