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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), author: SF

Wen Jing | Wen Jing

Production | editorial Department of Science focus

Recently, Ranga P. Dias, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester in the United States, announced that the room temperature superconductivity of lutetium-hydrogen-nitrogen ternary material has been realized at 10,000 atmospheric pressure. As soon as the news came out, there was a heated discussion.

Subsequently, the results of the study by Ranga P. Dias's team were officially published in Nature. The paper presents a more complete experimental data, and Ranga P. Dias said the paper went through five rounds of review. However, considering the author's academic resume, the academic circles have different opinions on the results of this research.

At present, the difficulty in the study of superconductors is temperature. For some materials, the superconducting state can be well realized at low temperature. On the one hand, room temperature superconductivity can reduce the cooling cost, on the other hand, it can avoid the instability of superconductors due to heating.

And the experimental condition of Ranga P. Dias is 10,000 atmospheric pressure. This is also interesting information for superconductor experiments at millions of atmospheres.

If this research result is verified by other scientific research teams, and proved to have economic value, and finally put into industrial production, the whole process of transformation will be quite a long time.

For ordinary onlookers, instead of using their "riddled" knowledge of physics to think about something that will not affect our lives in the last decade or two, it is better to take this opportunity to learn a moderately difficult knowledge point. Let's take a look at lutetium in this superconductor material.

What is lutetium? Lutetium (Lu), Lutetium in English. The atomic number is 71, which belongs to lanthanide. There are very few reserves on earth, so they are very expensive.

Lutetium is a silver-white metal, soft, but with high hardness and density in rare earth elements, melting point 1663 ℃, boiling point 3395 ℃, density 9.8404.

The luster of the metal is between silver and iron.

The impurity content has a great influence on the properties of lutetium, so there are obvious differences in the description of its physical properties in different literatures.

Naturally occurring isotopes are 175Lu and β emitter 176Lu with a half-life of 2.1x10 ^ 10 years.

Lutetium is relatively stable in the air. Soluble in dilute acid, can interact with water slowly.

The salt is colorless and the oxide is white.

How was lutetium discovered? Lutetium was separated from ytterbium by French chemist G.Urbain in 1907. The Latin name of lutetium comes from the ancient name of Paris, France, where Urban was born.

How to get lutetium? Nowadays, lutetium can be prepared by reduction of lutetium fluoride LuF3 ·2H2O with calcium.

What's the use of lutetium? Lutetium is mainly used in research work, but has few other uses.

The most important use is as a catalyst for petroleum cracking, alkylation, hydrogenation and polymerization.

Lutetium can be used to make some special alloys, such as lutetium aluminum alloy for neutron activation analysis.

Doping lutetium in some laser crystals such as yttrium aluminum garnet and aluminum yttrium neodymium tetraborate can improve its laser performance and optical uniformity.

Lutetium tantalate can be used as a material for X-ray phosphors.

Synthetic radionuclide 177Lu can be used in radiation therapy of tumor.

Lutetium can be used as a raw material for magnetic bubble storage.

Lutetium has potential applications in electrochromic displays and low-dimensional molecular semiconductors.

Is lutetium poisonous? Like other rare earth metals, lutetium is considered to have a low degree of toxicity, but its compounds should be handled with care.

For example, lutetium fluoride irritates the skin and is dangerous to inhale; lutetium nitrate is also a dangerous compound that may explode and burn; and lutetium oxide powder is toxic and can be dangerous if inhaled or ingested.

Soluble phosphonium salt has mild toxicity, but its solubility is low.

Will lutetium be ingested by the human body? Lutetium is thought to have no biological effect, but lutetium has also been found in humans, which is mainly concentrated in bones and has a small effect on the liver and kidneys.

The human body consumes about a few micrograms of lutetium every year, all from some plants.

Although the human body will eat a small amount of lutetium, but because the natural environment lutetium content is very low, generally do not need to limit its intake.

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