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Surprising Superconduction in Plutonium
jihema writes "Dr Strangelove would have liked this : a plutonium compound turns out to be a superconductor at relatively high temperature (18 K). The magnetic properties of this metal make this fact rather unexpected and contradicts the accepted theory on superconduction."
Superconducting power lines would transmit electricity from power plants to homes without most of the energy loss that occurs now
Unless someone takes them down to build an atomic bomb!
and run high voltage through it"
Dosent this sound like some kind of bad b-move plot?? Im wating for the time traveling DeLorean to show up.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Are you sure this wasn't discovered by Jan Hendrik Schon?
I thought the best superconductors would
work at close the temperature of salty
ice water, say -15C or 258K. 18K is like
-255C. That's pretty damn cold.
You mean we were fitting rockets to those things for years, when all we needed was a great huge magnet?
Man, the Pentagon's going to be pissed.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
That's a very low temperature. If I remember correctly, there are ceramic composites that become superconducting at temperatures far over 100 K.
The article clearly says the team was at Los Alamos National Laboratory. LANL has the authority for this type of work. Sarrao is not some random university professor. He works for LANL.
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18 K is hardly a "low-temperature" superconductor. That temperature is around where helium finally becomes a liquid, which was where superconductor research was at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Nowadays, we have things like HTS material (bismuth-based, copper oxide ceramic) which will superconduct up to temperatures of 108 K! A far cry from 18 K.
For those metric impaired people in the audience, 108 K (aka -165 C) is -265 F. 18 K (aka -255 C) is - 427 F. HST composites only need liqud nitrogen (which costs the same as milk), rather then liquid helium (which is very, very, very expensive) to work.
--
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Universities use radioactive stuff for a lot of things. It's generally hard to get, but not that hard. Getting something weapons grade is out of the question, as is getting a whole lot of radioactive material.
So, yes, it is relatively easy for "some random University professor" to get Plutonium if he really wanted to study it. More than that, many of these "random University professors" could easily find out how to extract small quantities of (non-weapons grade) radioactive substances out of... say, dirt. Those are just some of the benefits when you have a PhD in physics.
Have no fear though, the government and all the other "random University professors" keep a close watch on work done involving radioactive substances. It's important for safety, and the advancement and trust of science that this kind of work doesn't lead to any thefts or public danger.
The LAST thing one of these "random University professors" would do is buy Plutonium on the black market.
18K is relatively warm compared to where they expected it would become superconductive (like 2K).
Though I'll grant that "18K" by itself doesn't make a good figure to quote for the /. submission.
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All of the very high K superconductors (>100 K) are (IIRC) brittle ceramic compunds that could not be easily constructed into something of commercial use.
While Plutonium is "extremely radioactive and chemically toxic", it is just a base metal, not a compound. I am not to familiar with the metallic properties of Plutonium (malleability, brittleness, etc) but I would imagine that if one metal (even if it is trans-uranic) has high K properties like Plutonium, others may as well...
At long last, maybe Archimedes Plutonium will get the attention he deserves for his brilliant theories explaining how the entire universe is really a single atom of plutonium.
001 A picture introduction to the ONE ATOM PLUTONIUM EVERYTHING UNIVERSE, 231PU ATOM TOTALITY theory
Excerpt follows:
Note that the start of this website is the Atom Totality theory and the end of this website is sci.religion which is apt, for think of the website rankings not as linear but as a circle coming back around. So we start with the hard core most general of all sciences and the most easily verified of all sciences-- physics and like a circle we come around to the worship of physics in sci.religion. Below in chemistry I have a circular periodic table, so think of the rankings on this website as sci.physics at the top and coming full circle back around is sci.religion which is basically the worship of physics since God is 231Pu and the best bible is the best most up-to-date physics textbook.
First, nothing begins if not opening
Read the article, it talked about superconductors at 138K...however, for materials you 'don't expect' to superconduct, they typically do superconduct, but at around 2-3K.
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Can anyone actually point me to a useful working product of superconductors, or holograms or nanotechnology ? Apparently, these things are the Holy Grail of Science. Methinks they are more like the Emperor's New Clothes.
The LAST thing one of these "random University professors" would do is buy Plutonium on the black market.
Of course; could you imagine putting this on a research grant?
Name: Plutonium
Qty: 100g
Vendor: mumble
:)
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
HST composites only need liqud nitrogen (which costs the same as milk)... ...but is nowhere near as much fun when worn as a mustache!
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As a previous poster said; this is a high tempature becasue this is a metal based semiconductor, not a cermaic based one. Two different processes going on, hench type 1 and type 2 semicondutors.
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I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner store, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by!
I am by far no expert in superconductivity, but I have worked with superconductive materials here and there. This discovery seems very similar to that of MgB2, which superconducts at about twice the temp, 37K or so. If I remember correctly, wasn't that a type-I superconductor? It seems to me that this plutonium-based superconductor (is it just pure Pu?) would be a classical BCS type-I superconductor. Most type-II's tend to be really complex as far as their constiutent elements numbers and ratios, e.g. YBCO. Plus, 18K is well below 37K, so in the regime of classical type-I Tc's. Also, I think that the cooper pairs are probably being formed by the valence f-orbital electrons. Maybe a theorist can show that this yields the lowest possible ground state energy. Besides, Yb of YBCO fame is also in the same group of elements as Pu who have partially filled f-orbitals.
In Copenhagen, students were recently allowed to purchase Two kilograms of weapons-grade uranium!
The students were part of a group that do experimental shows demonstrating funny/scary/fascinating physics. Apparently the guy who signed the list of wanted equipment didn't notice the uranium between the more boring stuff such as lasers etc.
Now we just need a seller. Any offers? (Yeah, I know, i should just mail press@uruklink.net and offer to keep it while there's inspectors around)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
All these comments. All of you look in your browser cookies if you went to the site where
the article that generated this 'high temperature'
superconductivity in plutonium. There you will
find cookies from 'fastclick.net'. The original
article will not display if you to not eat this
and maybe other cookies. This tells me that this
whole discussion may be bogus. The whole point
of the article may have been to get people to
click on it in order to push cookies from
fastclick.net.......a kind of siren song to lure
sailers to the rocks.....a digital lorelei...
ad nauseum.
The compound was PuCoGa5 and related to some heavy fermion compounds of similar composition.
I just read this first page (Introduction to 231Pu universe etc) and it is the biggest load of crap I've seen since creationism. I'm surprised the Swedish government allows the association of its TLD with this junk.
Why do I say this? I read the page, and see this guy making his claims. Where's his evidence? I scroll down some more waiting for the exposition to end and the science to start. Hmm, still none, still just more guff saying how clever the guy thinks he is. Whoops, it's the bottom of the page. Perhaps he should rename his site 'tabloidphysics.se'.
And the actual source material: He didn't actually say what his theory was, but I glark that he thinks the universe is an atom of plutonium, and the Milky Way is one of its electrons. Now, riddle me this. The universe has more than 94 galaxies. So, unless I've just busted his theory, I guess I haven't read far enough to reach the section where he rubbishes observational astronomy?
how do you cool anything that far???
meh.