For more than a quarter century, scientists have been trying to identify new high-temperature superconductors. Mostly, the search consists of calculations, simulations, and tweaking known superconducting materials in an attempt to achieve more desirable properties. Now two teams of physicists are taking a brute-force approach: They are looking for signs of superconductivity in vast numbers of existing materials that were formed under extreme conditions.
As part of a larger search for new superconductors, Johnpierre Paglione and colleagues at the University of Maryland, Iowa State University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are measuring the magnetic susceptibility of minerals from the Department of Mineral Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “The types of chemical bonding in the compounds that show high-temperature superconductivity [are] akin to what is found in many mineral compounds,” Paglione says. Another attraction of examining existing samples is that the process of exploratory synthesis is...
