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To counteract this issue, the CityU team introduced an innovative solution: anchoring the SAM onto an inherently stable nickel oxide surface, thereby enhancing the SAM's binding energy on the substrate.

"We discovered that high-temperature exposure can cause the chemical bonds within SAM molecules to fracture, negatively impacting device performance. So our solution was akin to adding a heat-resistant armour -- a layer of nickel oxide nanoparticles, topped by a SAM, achieved through an integration of various experimental approaches and theoretical calculations," Professor Zhu said.

The team at CityU has engineered a unique type of self-assembled monolayer, or SAM for short, and anchored it on a nickel oxide surface as a charge extraction layer.

Writing in Nature, Li et al.3 report that a neodymium strontium nickel oxide, Nd0.8Sr0.2NiO2, superconducts below 9–15 K. This material has a similar crystal structure to that of the cuprate superconductors, suggesting that the authors’ discovery could lead to a better understanding of superconductivity in these systems.

And now they've found that adding trace amounts of what O’Hayre calls “magic pixie dust”—actually copper oxide and nickel oxide—to their ceramic mixture enables them to reduce the temperature to 1450°C, below the threshold where barium vaporizes.