Slashdot Mirror


Diamonds As Room-Temperature Superconductors

Stormalong writes "This article describes research into using diamonds as room-temperature superconductors. If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!"

3 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Diamond prices by tybalt44 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Remember, the next time you buy a diamond for your sweetie, slave (and probably child) labor, blood, sweat and tears literally goes into each one. Ahh...nothing says love like the suffering of your fellow man. If this concerns you, then you should probably buy Canadian Arctic Diamonds which are exploitation- and conflict-free.

  2. Re:Thermal and Electrical Conductivity by Bender_ · · Score: 5, Informative
    High electrical conductivity and high thermal conductivity tend to run together. For instance copper has an electrical conductivity of 5.8x10^7 S/m and a thermal conductivity of 200 W/mK.

    This is known as Wiedeman-Franz Law in Physics. It describes the relationship between eletron heat transfer and conductivity. However it is only valid for Metals. Heat transfer in semiconductors is dominated by lattice vibration transport. Due to the bandgap there is little phonon/electron interaction.

    A notable exception is diamond with a low electrical conductivity on the order of 1 S/m and a high thermal conductivity of 700 W/mK.

    Its not an exception, its a semiconductor with a large bandgap and behaves exactly as expected.

  3. Re:big whup. you still can't make wires by TechnoWeenie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?

    I did not know this, so I did some quick googling and found some interesting numbers. According to the DOE the total U.S. generation of electricity for 1999 was 3691 billion kilowatt hours.
    http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav1/i ntro.html#tab1

    According to the Danish Windpower Industry Association, a modern wind turbine will generate about 2 to 3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
    http://www.windpower.org/faqs.htm#anchor727849

    If these numbers (and my math) is right, your conclusion is off by about an order of magnitude