Very slow progress, but progress nevertheless!
Instead of a room temperature superconductor moonshot project, Western governments waste tons of money on unreliable and environmentally hazardous renewable energy!
"... Currently, at normal atmospheric pressure, the class of high temperature superconductors known as the cuprates—compounds containing both copper and oxygen atoms—come the closest, with the best-performing cuprate able to superconduct at temperatures as "warm" as -140 degrees Celsius. ...
But now, researchers ... have developed a theory that explains some of the magnetic properties of cuprate superconductors. Cuprate superconducting materials exhibit a layer effect, where their magnetic and superconducting properties are enhanced as more layers of the constituent copper and oxygen atoms are brought together. ... explain how the magnetic layer effect arises from fluctuations of the electrons between the copper and oxygen atoms and their surrounding atoms.
"This is a first step toward understanding the governing principles behind the superconducting layer effect, and what controls the superconducting temperature in superconductors more generally," ..."
From the abstract:
"The quantitative description of correlated electron materials remains a modern computational challenge. We demonstrate a numerical strategy to simulate correlated materials at the fully ab initio level beyond the solution of effective low-energy models, and apply it to gain a detailed microscopic understanding across a family of cuprate superconducting materials in their parent undoped states. We uncover microscopic trends in the electron correlations and reveal the link between the material composition and magnetic energy scales via a many-body picture of excitation processes involving the buffer layers. Our work illustrates a path towards a quantitative and reliable understanding of more complex states of correlated materials at the ab initio many-body level."
Systematic electronic structure in the cuprate parent state from quantum many-body simulations (open access; preprint version)
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