Bell Labs Creates Plastic Superconductor

hoffmanm8 writes "Extending AT&T's grasp on every convieable non-software tech thing, scientists @ Bell Labs have found a way to make a plastic superconductor. (NYTimes, requires free registration). This could be pretty cool/scary unless, of course, the plastic superconductor is to the early 2000's as 'cold fusion' was to the late 20th Century."

Comments

Incorrect Slashdot Article Title

[Preston Pfarner]

Editor, please fix the title on this article.

At the moment, it "Bell Labs Creates Plastic
Semiconductor". However, both the Slashdot
article and (more significantly) the NYTimes
article refer to plastic superconductors.

It should be something along the lines of:

"Bell Labs Creates Plastic Superconductor"

Better Links

[Alien54]

Remember, whe you want to go to the NYT site, use the word channel anstead of WWW

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SU PE.html

now of course, Lucent has a website, with the press release here. The page with photos of the team can be found here on the bell labs site.

As Usual, the story was first reported in NATURE (NOTE - free registration gives some access, paid registration gives more)

ahhh progress...

[lmaali]

As someone who works in the field of conjugated (conducting/semiconducting) polymers, I have to say that this is actually very exciting news. /.ers tend to cast a cynical eye over scientific breakthroughs that won't turn into actual products by 5 PM tomorrow, but examine this for its scientific value and perhaps you will appreciate it more.

The capabilities of conjugated polymers are expanding at a great rate, perhaps because of the backing that R&D is now getting from some VERY large companies. This is especially true since the founders of the field received the recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry (I'll admit to being biased as one of them is my boss).

The promise of these materials is more that of lighter and cheaper than anything else at this point. That may change in the near future though. It's not that they are better materials that those that are in use now, but rather the fact that they are perhaps a bit easier and cheaper to process, relatively inexpensive to make, and perhaps more suited to particular applications. For example, there are groups working on making emissive displays out of semiconducting polymers. If you can make them on a plastic substrate rather than glass, you have a display that you don't have to worry about breaking when you drop your laptop/handheld/cellphone. Now, if we can make one that is easier to see in the sunlight and gives you longer battery life, those are pluses as well.

As far as the superconductors go, we were sure it would happen someday as one of the primary excitations of these materials is what is called a bipolaron. It's basically a Cooper Pair in a conjugated polymer (Cooper Pairs being that thing that makes ceramic superconductors do their thing). The primary problem was getting the polymers to order, or line up, properly. So now it's been done. Yes, it's at a very cold temperature, but all of the first traditional superconductors were down there pretty far too.

By the way, remember that guy who figured out how to make the laser? He didn't know what to do with it at first either. It didn't take too long before it gave people ideas...