Testing IRL's metal

Grant Williams: assessing the potential of iron-based superconductivity

Superconductivity is a phenomenon where some materials conduct electricity with no resistance or energy loss during the transmission process.

High temperature superconductors are very cold but termed high because they operate at much higher temperatures than low temperature superconductors. HTS^[?] technology yields products which are lighter, smaller and more efficient than existing copper wire technology.

Interest in HTS compounds containing iron dramatically increased in 2008 when Yoichi Kamihara and colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology reported that an iron-based compound can be made to superconduct below -247 degrees Celsius.

However, there is no clear consensus concerning the fundamental physics and this is crucial for future commercialisation of the technology.

A team of IRL researchers, Dr Grant Williams, Professor Jeff Tallon, and Dr Andrew Kay, have now been granted $750,000 over three years by the Marsden Fund to research the complex and competing magnetic and electronic interactions in iron-based compounds.

This research has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of how high-temperature superconductivity actually works and create a new global market, according to programme leader Grant Williams.

“Until the advent of high-temperature copper oxide-based superconductors, magnetism and superconductivity were considered antagonistic. Ironically they now seem to be intimately linked and magnetism plays a very important role in allowing superconductivity to occur at relatively high temperatures.

“There is potential for superconducting compounds containing iron to supersede copper oxide compounds for a number of important commercial applications. It’s very difficult at this stage to predict, but it’s possible that a new market for iron-based superconductors could grow to one billion dollars by the end of the next decade.”