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by crote 1050 days ago
The conductors of your ohmmeter are not that important, though. You can work around that by using four-terminal sensing, and you can of course also calibrate your probes by directly touching them together. Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high enough resolution.

A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 μΩ (or 2e-5) at room temperature. That's already getting tricky to measure with lab-grade equipment without pushing insane currents through it, let alone anything even smaller. If you want to measure a 1m-diameter 1m-long silver rod (which would be 0.02μΩ or 2e-8) you could just push a few thousand amps through it and reliably measure that using a household multimeter in the mV range - but do that with a small sample and it'll evaporate.

2 comments

> Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high enough resolution.

Not that low in range though, you will end up seeing thermal noise that dwarfs your measurement.

How about the wires connected to your probes? Or the internal electronics that are used to gauge resistance? How do you work around those?
Calibration. But electric fields across wiring in such sensitive applications is a real problem.
simply build the material into a device that cannot work without superconduction and then see whether it does ;)