Physics Commons^™

Stoichiometric Determination Of Hydride Materials At Extreme Conditions, Gregory Alexander Smith

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Hydrogen was predicted to be a high-temperature superconductor at near-megabar conditions in 1968,[1] but only recently was been experimentally observed.[2] This is due to the extraneous metrological constraint of requiring 5 megabars of pressure to stabilize. A more practical approach for synthesis of high-temperature superconductors has been pro-posed through the use of hydride compounds. Recently, a surge of rare earth hydrides have achieved critical superconducting transition temperatures (T_C ) close to room temperature.[3, 4, 5, 6] However, due to limitations of the necessary instrumentation to achieve megabar pressures, many techniques traditionally used to measure stoichiometry are unavailable.Three works presented in …