It’s not an amalgam (that means a mercury alloy) or any metallic alloy. It’s an oxide (more complicated than that but there’s more oxygen atoms than metal atoms).
Re:Breaking Superconductor News
by BizarroLand on Thursday July 27, 2023 @01:51PM
(#36897511)
Amalgam can also mean, "A mixture or combination of different things" such as "an amalgam of musical genres" or "an amalgam of unsavory dog food flavors", which, since we aren't talking about mercury at all, nor are we talking about any form of dentistry, should have be evident and deducible from the context.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
And we very much are talking about an alloy, which is a "metallic substance composed of two or more elements"
https://www.britannica.com/technology/alloy
Lead is a metal. Copper is a metal, a combination of 2 metals is an alloy.
However, you are right, I did overlook that the compound is an oxide, my bad.
I know they were formed from sulfur compounds, but the production process should have eliminated those compounds, and the final forming is done in a vacuum so there shouldn't be any oxide generation to form non-conductive barriers.
I don't know much about the process but shouldn't they be testing resistance in a superconductor?