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!"

Comments

Re:Diamonds as CPUs

[dhovis]

Eh....

Diamonds aren't forever, they are only a metastable state.

Besides, "A Diamond is Forever" is a DeBeers marketing sloagan created in the 1920s, not some ancient piece of wisdom.

Re:Diamonds as CPUs

[hero]

That's what really pisses me off. Diamonds are a very very useful natural resource, but instead of being able to take advantage of that, we're forced to pay huge prices only to have them end up as decorations on some floozy. deBeers is evil.

-hero.

big whup. you still can't make wires

[js7a]

Firstly, I read about this in sci.physics.* or some metafilter rss some days ago. It's still very theoretical that any kind of large mass production is even possible, let alone practical.

Even if it turns out to be practical, there is still the problem faced by the ceramic superconductors: even if you can get them to ambient temperatures, they still are brittle, rigid, and unmalleable and therefore totally unlike wires. The best you could hope for is to lay these things end-to-end in a trench by the side of the road, and the first earthquake or vibrational disturbance that comes along is going to snap, crack, and pop the circuit open. Unlike wires and fiber optics, which at least stand a chance of anything short of a backhoe.

Ordinary wind power is of far more practical importance than superconductors, fusion, fuel cells, and solar energy combined. However, Slashdot editors regularly pick those topics for the front page. In the rare event that /. does something on wind power, it's always in the non-front-page "Science" section. Come on, "stuff that matters" should actually matter. Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?

Re:Manufacturing?

[merlin_jim]

One possible method is CVD - Chemical Vapor Deposition. When I was going through High School, for a couple hundred dollars of lab equipment (most of which was usable for other experiments and found in the store room of the chemlab), you could setup a lab to grow a diamond film. Now the diamond film grown there was mostly amorphous carbon, but there were micron-sized diamond crystals embedded in it.

The process involves flowing a mixture of alcohol (-COOH), Water Vapor, and Hydrogen over a hot (2400 degree Centigrade) tungsten filament, flowing the resulting gas over a warm (900 degree Centigrade) Si or Mb plate in an oxygen free environment. The idea being that when the mix hits the tungsten, the alcohol combines with the Hydrogen to from two water molecules, leaving the carbon as a free radical.

This was a repeat of an experiment from the 50's. I imagine they've improved the process to the point of being able to reliably grow larger crystals by now. I seem to remember that the heat differential between the filament and the plate was a problem (smaller heat differential = bigger/better crystals at a trade off of time to grow) and that the substrate was also a problem... an existing diamond crystal seed of some sort would provide a much better substrate. An Si substrate, for instance, means that the attatchment points on the surface of the plate for the carbon free radicals doesn't match what you would find in diamond, so adjacent deposition sites can't work together to form the same larger crystal.

Re:Diamonds as CPUs

[Wavicle]

The artificial diamond makers will then try to pull a "deBeers" on the mrket..

"de Beers" was able to pull a "de Beers" because the diamond deposits were geographically localized. Artificial diamonds can be produced anywhere. If demand surges, entrepreneurs will fill the supply void and prices will be kept low.