2025年2月18日，Nature News刊发报道《‘Unconventional’ nickel superconductor excites physicists》，对南科大科研团队发现常压下镍氧化物具高温超导电性这一科学突破给予了高度评价，称其令全球物理学家“感到振奋”。全文转载如下：
‘Unconventional’ nickel superconductor excites physicists
Superconductors would make make many technologies radically more efficient.Credit: Patrick Gaillardin/Look At Sciences/SPL
A new family of superconductors is exciting physicists. Compounds containing nickel have been shown to carry electricity without resistance at the relatively high temperature of 45 kelvin (–228 °C) — and without being squeezed under pressure.
Physicists at the Southern University of Science and Technology (Sustech) in Shenzhen, China, observed the major hallmarks of superconductivity in a thin film of crystals of nickel oxide, which they grew in the laboratory. They published their work1 in Nature on 17 February.
“There’s a huge hope that we could eventually raise the critical temperature and make [such materials] more useful for applications,” says Dafeng Li, a physicist at the City University of Hong Kong.
Nickelates now join two groups of ceramics — copper-based cuprates and iron-based pnictides — as ‘unconventional superconductors’ that operate at room pressure and temperatures as high as 150K (–123 °C). This new data point could help physicists to finally explain how high-temperature superconductors work, and ultimately to design materials that operate under ambient conditions. This would make technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging, radically cheaper and more efficient.
How unconventional superconductors operate at warmer temperatures remains largely a mystery, whereas the mechanism behind how some metals can carry electricity without resistance at colder temperatures, or extreme pressures, has been understood2 since 1957.
The ability of the Sustech researchers to precisely engineer the material’s properties is huge boon in trying to use nickelates to unravel the theory behind unconventional superconductivity, says Lilia Boeri, a physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome. “The idea that you have a system that you can sort of tune experimentally, is something quite exciting.”
Raising temperatures
Excitement in nickelates has been growing since 2019 when Li and his colleagues found hints that compounds containing nickel behaved as superconductors, albeit at cold temperatures. These materials’ structural similarity to cuprates raised hopes that nickelates could be coaxed to conduct at higher temperatures. A separate group demonstrated this in 2023, but the materials were under high pressure.
Crystals of a nickelate compound.Credit: Argonne National Laboratory
In December, researchers at Stanford University in California saw the first signs of nickelate superconductivity under ambient pressure. The researchers went further in latest study, showing that the nickelate crystals lost resistance at a critical temperature and expelled magnetic fields.
Nickelates have a way to go before their critical temperature at which superconductivity kicks in matches the cuprates. Raising this is “a priority”, says Zhuoyu Chen, a physicist at Sustech and study co-author. The team is trying various tricks to tweak the way the material is grown and its precise composition, he says.
Getting the nickelate to superconduct at room pressure means samples can be better probed, to understand behaviour of their electrons, using methods that would be challenging under high pressure, he adds.
Global push
Superconductivity has drawn global interest in the past two years, but not always for the right reasons. The field was rocked by now-retracted high-profile claims of room-temperature superconductivity by physicist Ranga Dias, then at the University of Rochester in New York. A separate viral claim about a material dubbed LK-99 — also hoped to be a room-temperature superconductor — was found to be flawed.
The quality of the evidence in this latest paper is “absolutely great”, says Li, and others are likely to reproduce it soon. “In China I see people working day and night to synthesize new materials, to try to discover new physics about such systems.”
Major laboratories worldwide are reallocating resources to study nickelates, adds Chen. “Such fervent activity underscores the community’s optimism: nickelates may hold the key to unifying disparate theories of high-temperature superconductivity.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00450-3
References
1、Zhou, G. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08755-z (2025).
2、Bardeen, J., Cooper, L. N. & Schrieffer, J. R. Phys. Rev. 108, 1175 (1957).
报道链接：https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00450-3
南方科技大学微信
南方科技大学视频号
南方科技大学抖音号
南方科技大学快手号
南方科技大学头条号
南方科技大学南方+
