High-Temperature Superconductors

Anonymous Coward writes "Seems all those scientists who've spent years tweaking exotic materials at freakily low temperatures to turn them into superconductors should've just looked on the lab shelf. Magnesium diboride superconducts at much higher temperatures than other metallics and could even bust the theoretical max T, says this story at New Scientist. There's more research on the same here but 40K's still pretty cold - when's my laptop gonna run for free?"

Comments

significance

[apsmith]

The first "high-Tc" superconductor was also only around 40 K - the thing was it was a new type of material (an oxide ceramic) that had previously never before been tested; similar to this case, although this time the material seems to be even simpler. With the old-style high-Tc materials it was only a few months before they got the things working above liquid nitrogen; it's possible tweaking this material will do the same thing or even better, you never know. Really exciting!