On July 23, Anshu Pandey and his doctoral student Dev Kumar Thapa, from the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Department of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, posted a paper on the arXiv preprint repository titled ‘Evidence for Superconductivity at Ambient Temperature and Pressure in Nanostructures’.
In essence, the authors made the extraordinary claim that they had discovered superconducting behaviour at room temperature and pressure in a nanostructured composite material of silver and gold – formed by embedding silver nanoparticles in a gold matrix.
Nanostructured materials are those whose mictrostructures have a characteristic length of a few nanometers,