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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!"
Now we can have computer rooms that look like levels from Megaman.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It sounds interesting, although it's hard to put too much weight
into it yet because their results have yet to be independently
verified. He also hasn't even shown it can "expel mangetic
fields to conclusivlely prove that the state is
superconducting."
At least the heading of the article was posted with a question
mark, rather than as an authoritative claim.
If the claim proves to be true, it would be interesting to see
what practical application it can be put to. Will the fact that
it could be a replacement for "hot" cathodes in TV tubes even be
relevant by the time this technology is ready for practical
application. With some of the other new technologies that are
on the horizon such as OLED's, it will be interesting to see
what the life span of the bulky CRT will be.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
You forget that most /.'ers associate "engagement" with a Counterstrike session ...
"CPUs are Forever" is not conducive to Moore's Law.
This space for rent
Don't you mean "one day your loved one might BE a diamond CPU"?
What better way to say "forever" than with a diamond? What better way to say "maybe 18 months" than with a cpu?
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.
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.
Because of diamond's superior thermal conductivity and low electrical conductivity, it functions as an excellent material for use in a heat sink.
What interests me is, that by adding free electrons by doping the diamond with oxygen is he seeing actual superconductivity or just the high conductivity one would expect, if diamond had free electrons.
Michael.
Visit das Schlößl.
Linux : Mac
No thanks, I'll stick with AMD and cubic zirconias.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
SciFi Today ran this story a couple of days ago with LOTS of interesting extra links here.
he believes that the results of his experiments ... can only be explained by a new type of superconducting state. "If it is not superconductivity then it must be violating the second law of thermodynamics," he says.
Yep. Once you exclude the possiblility that you somehow screwed up your experiment you can safely conclude the only possibility is violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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?
In recent years, some scientists have been able to product synthetic diamonds - only distinguishable from "real" diamonds by the fact that the synthetics glow under phosphorescent light (or something like that). I believe the natural diamonds don't do this because of their imperfections. They looked at the possibility of selling synthetics as an alternative in the gemstone market, but De Beers simply threatened to run them out of business with the aforementioned market flooding. The cost of producing synthetics would remain mostly constant, and it wouldn't be worth it if diamond prices took a nosedive.
Now, enter this new possibility (they're still investigating whether it's even true, according to the article). If it becomes economically desirable to produce synthetic diamonds for superconducting purposes, I wonder if that would alter the gemstone diamond market? Perhaps producers could make synthetics primarily for superconducting applications, but slowly insert more into the gemstone market, pulling it out from under De Beers' noses. Eventually they'd be forced to flood the market and the end of an evil, expertly marketed monopoly could come to pass? One can only hope!
The above summary was from memory based on what I've read. I could have gotten some things wrong, so feel free to google for links. I'm too lazy. ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
would be that they are "free as in deBeers".
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!
Because, God knows, women can be counted on for preferring a practical gift over a romantic one.
Room temp superconductivity is nifty. What's (literally) incredible is that the guy is claiming to have produced "Bose-Einstein-type condensate" at room temperature, as opposed to the usual few-billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
I find "experimental error" to be far more plausible, but of course it's hard to know without seeing both the original researcher's work as well as third-party confirmation results.
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The single most important development that would come out of a room-temperature superconductor would be the elimination of batteries, fuel cells, gas tanks, and every other such power storage technology.
Because a superconductor conducts with literally zero resistance, you can create a ring of superconducting material, pump as much current into it as it will tolerate, and just let the current cycle forever. No degradation whatsoever. Then when you want power, you just tap into the ring and pull it out on demand. Superconducting rings are real devices, by the way -- they're just big and expensive and require cryogenics.
If we could make them out of something that operated at room temperature, then we could (probably) make very small superconducting rings, and if the power density were high enough, we could use them instead of batteries or fuel tanks. And they would never, ever wear out, no matter how many times you charged or discharged them. The amount of power they could contain is dependent on the superconducting material in question, but a high-power-density room-temperature superconductor (if such a thing is possible) would eliminate all of mankind's power storage and transmission problems. The only concern left would be generation.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!
...What if I want her to say "Yes"?
They glow because they're doped--rubies were shown on a PBS show a few years back. Lab created gems are generally doped with elements to make them distinguishable somehow--don't think scientists and engineers don't get bribed to produce a perfect gem.
Yes, single crystal 'gems' created in the lab are for all intents and purposes, perfect, they have to be to be used in any experiment concerning the creation of semiconducting devices.
It probably would NOT change the gemstone market due to cost of growing diamonds. IIRC, CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) is currently the only way to produce diamonds for manufacturing. This is in no way as cheap or easy to do is pulling a 'perfect' silicon ingot out of a molten bath.
So, when's lunch?
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.
The article skimped out on theoretical details, but the Bose-Enstein-type condensate refers to the superconducting phase-transition where the electrons form Cooper-pairs (through an electron-lattice-electron interaction). These Cooper pairs are spin-zero (the electrons pair anti-symetrically into the singlet state), and act like bosons, which can condense into the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Note that this is NOT exactly like a Bose-Einstein condensate because the bosons themselves contain two fermions, which are effectively coupled. These are similar, but not the same as the rubidium atoms in the BEC experiment you linked to. So it is kind of a BEC, but not exactly.
Now regarding your mention of a few-billionths of a degree above absolute zero, that is for the rubidium-atom experiment. THe superconducting phase-transition, which is what this article was referring to, happens in many elements at a few Kelvins, and in High-Tc materials up to the record of 150 K (I think).
Beyond that, there is other stuff that is sketchy, such as the professor retiring and not verifying that the diamond superconductors demonstrate the Meissner Effect (magnetic field expulsion from the interior of a superconductor) and other things. If this was really superconducting, I'd be sure he'd stay on as emeritus for at least a few years and keep going with these experiments, where he has a head-start over all other groups. If this is really room-temp Tc material that the article purports it to be, then this is HUGE news, and he should stay emeritus than quit research entirely. Hmmm...
make world, not war
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.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
They are all Token Rings any way, but hopefully I can get meaningful 2 way communication next time, and not just a bunch of lost packets and wasted resources.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Yikes. If you try to "tap in" to an inductor, it will produce an enormous voltage and immediately arc to close the circuit. The only way to get energy out of a superconducting solenoid is through some magnetic interaction.
If you pick the number of windings carefully, tapping directly into the inductor works just fine.
The inductor wants to maintain the current flowing through the coil. If that is the amount of current you expect to draw for your load, both load and coil will be perfectly happy in the new configuration. If you wish to draw less current (or tolerate interruptions without arcing), drop a resistor in parallel with the load. This will limit voltage across the load to the amount needed to push the coil's current through the resistor.
When you aren't using the load, of course, you short across it so as to reduce resistive power loss. Typically this switching is actually performed by having a closed coil, and heating the part you want to cut out above the superconducting breakdown temperature, if I understand correctly.
The only design difficulty is that this requires a large number of windings (sheet current is typically millions of amps or more, which means you need millions of windings for a load that draws 1A).
Superconductors have a number of important uses in analytical instruments, too. A superconducting magnet sits at the heart of most nuclear magnetic resonance machines, as such magnets are capable of carrying enormous currents with almost no resistance, enabling them to produce magnetic fields of over 20T (400,000 times the strength of the magnetic field of the earth). Most of these magnets are made from alloys of niobium, with critical temperatures (the temp below which superconductivity occurs) around 23 Kelvin, meaning they need liquid helium to cool them. I happen to have a student job dispensing cryogens for research groups on campus- we charge about 4 bucks a liter for liquid helium, and some groups will go through a full 65L dewar in a couple days. Efforts have been made to move to the Type II (cuprate ceramic) superconductors discovered in the late 1980s, but as others have mentioned, ceramic can't be extruded into wire the way most metals can. Still, there is significant financial incentive to use Type II materials- liquid nitrogen, which boils at 77K, only costs about 20 cents per liter. Of course, with a room-temperature superconductor, there would be no cooling expenses, and there would also be no need for bulky cryostats surrounding equipment- it's likely we could see mobile MRI and NMR machines.
In addition to their uses as magnetic coils, superconductors can be used to exploit something nifty called the Josephson effect: if you separate two superconductors by a tiny insulating gap, a supercurrent of Cooper pairs can quantum tunnel across the gap. This effect can be used in a device known as a SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), which is essentially a fantastically sensitive magnetometer- some SQUIDs can detect fields of less than a picotesla. This has already had important applications in materials science- there are scanning-SQUID microscopes, and is finding a number of uses in medicine- specifically measuring the magnetic activity of the brain and heart. Also, SQUIDs will probably have a future in computers, as hyperfast switches, sensitive hard disk heads, or as sensors used in quantum computers, detecting the state of a qubit. IBM tried to make a computer using Josephson junctions as switches back in the late 1970s- there were a number of hurdles that prevented this device from becoming a reality, mostly the incredible rate at which "conventional" silicon chip ICs were improved, and the fact that this conventional technology does not require you to immerse your computer in liquid helium.
And yeah, there could finally be maglev trains- those operate off of the Meissner effect, discovered in the 1930s- superconductors are perfectly diamagnetic- they will expel any external magnetic field, causing the magnet (or superconductor) to be levitated. This is the effect that the scientist who observed the possible diamond RTS admits he has not done experiments to check, and it's the effect I'd really need evidence of in order to believe his findings.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Well, first off, as someone else pointed out, I should have said 1.5 million turbines, not 150,000, so as not to assume constant peak output as I had mistakenly done. However, each one of those turbines takes only 36 square meters, meaning that all 1.5 million would take less than 14,000 acres, or about as much oak forest that is lost each year in California alone, or less than twice the area of the Stanford University campus.
That power costs about 4 cents per killowatt hour, compared to 3 cents for poorly-scrubbed coal (compared to European scrubbing standards, which result in 4 cents/kwh), anywhere from 7 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas (depending on market rates with occasional shortages) 11 cents/kwh for nuclear (plus hidden externalities for waste disposal). In other words, it's the best deal around.
Right, you hit the nail on the head for the 150,000 figure. Again, I should have said 1.5 million for average output values. The occasional drop caused by widespread windlessness could be backed up by hydroelectric power stations, or storage systems.
Uh, What?. Synthetic gemstones are chemically indistinguishable from the real thing. For a while, the distinguishing characteristic of lab created gemstones was their remarkable lack of defects. However, enterprising companies that make synthetic stones have figured out how to include the defects that you normally see in natural stones. So you can no longer tell the difference. There is no law to require they be marked, and there is no inscentive for the manufacturers to do so. If you saw stones that glowed, they were probably made that way for industrial use. Ti-doped Sapphire (Al2O3) is used for "tunable" lasers, for example. In fact, the first laser was made from ruby (Cr-doped Sapphire). These days people can make synthetic sapphires the width of a telephone pole and several feet long. They are used as windows on the barcode scanners in the supermarket because sapphire is much more scratch resistant than glass.
Frankly I don't understand why people value stones that were dug up out of the ground more than ones created in the lab. It's not like there is a real difference. Besides, if you actually visited a gemstone mine, you would probably lose all the romantic ideas you have about the origin of the stones.
As far as synthetic diamonds go, there are several possible ways to produce them. CVD is commonly done to produce diamond films for research. GE Superabrasives produces industrial diamonds using a high pressure process for decades. The diamonds are small, but they are cost effective. GE also produces "clarity enhanced" diamonds. They take natural diamonds that are lousy color and treat them to make them a more appealing color. Can you tell? I doubt it.
I'm a materials scientist, and I suspect that synthetic diamonds are less than a decade off. When that happens, the whole house of cards that is the diamond industry will come crashing down. Diamonds are not rare, but DeBeers controls most of the supply. When they loose that control, diamonds will crash to a price befitting their rarety.
And don't go around thinking that diamonds have ever been a good investment. The vast majority of diamonds actually depreciate relative to inflation.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
"If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!"
And promptly have her kick your nuts in.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
It is apparently quite easy to tell these diamonds from natural diamonds. I saw a program on this not that long ago. Any competent jeweler could easily tell the difference:
1) Man-made gem-stone quality diamonds are generally too perfect.
2) These diamonds generally have non-natural coloring. Some are actually artificially colored (sky blue diamonds anyone?)
3) These diamonds fluorese under UV "Black" light.
As I understand it, one of the big goals for these guys (besides breaking the DeBeers distribution barrier) is to make the diamonds as 'real' as possible. So, they are working on ways to introduce flaws and color variations into the stones. I got the feeling from the program, they aren't that far away from their goal of manufacturing a 'natural' diamond.
DeBeers is so worried about the whole situation they are now micro-etching the DeBeers logo onto all their diamonds. This essentially means that anyone who buys a DeBeers natural diamond will be paying a premium for... a corporate logo.
DeBeers is aparently trying to become Nike.
I.V.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
For completeness, the exact same comment applies to men who buy Rolexes...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)