Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Wires
Silverlancer writes "Room temperature superconductors have often been a hallmark of far-future science fiction. But fortunately for us, they're here today, according to MIT's Technology Review. Richard Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the buckyball, is currently heading a project to produce a prototype carbon nanotube superconductor. They've already produced some wires up to 100 meters long--the only thing left to do is figure out how to produce only a certain type of nanotube, the "5,5 armchair nanotube," that conducts so well that it can be considered a superconductor."
I'm sure that in the next 5 minutes, the "5,5 armchair nanotube" will be criticized by the armchair physicists, the Slashdot equivalent of the armchair quarterback.
100 times stronger than a normal conductor, and able to carry a thousand volts in a sinlge bound!
That out the way, this is great news. There are so many useful scientific applications for superconducting wires that this is really cool news, once you get over the ethical dilemma caused by the fact that they are making them by *cloning* the orginals. It's ok to clone wires but not people? Hypocrites.
Interestingly,Dr. Smalley talked about armchair nanotube technology at the senate Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity generation Full Committee Hearing almost one year ago. The full text is here.
Iran captures three CIA agents
In short, not all new technologies will help bring about the worker paradise. Scientist and their capitalist pig ways!!! Soon the proletariat will rise and all you carbon nanotube superconductor makers will find yourselves up against a brick wall...
*bang!*
great! now i have something geekish to use for bondage with girls.
Sure... Now you just need the girls.
Seems like from one direction optical computing is advancing, from another we're working towards room-temperature superconductors.
So what's the future look like? Quantum processors with superconducting and optical connections? I wonder how these various technologies will actually be deployed?
While the effects are still debated, would this have any effect on radiation given off from high tension power lines? Would the electricity be carried at a higher or lower frequency?
Superconducting wires are "here today", the only left to do is to make super conducting wires.
In other news, I am now a billionaire with a super model trophy wife. The only thing left is for me to get a lot of money and a hot wife.
The article says that there is "almost no loss of energy." But real superconductors truly have zero resistance. Once you start a current in a superconducting loop it runs for years without decreasing. AFAIK a decrease has never been observed. The article is unclear about whether this actually is a super-conductor or not. Does anyone know for a fact?
So much work (and funding) is being poured into finding alternative energy sources, I wonder how much the discovery of a scaleable, inexpensive, widely deployable (as in converting the world's energy grid) superconducting power distribution system has been quantified.
I do understand that this isn't that, and that there are a million barriers to be overcome, and that fossil fuels need a replacement Real Soon Now, but I do wonder if anyone knows of any studies out there trying sort out how much energy is currently lost in the distribution of consumer power, and how much less we'd need to generate if a practical superconducting solution is found.
Factoring in a reasonable probability of success in both sides, it would be interesting to see whether the potential cost/benefit of investments in finding superconducting solutions all the way to the last mile might be as or more efficient in the long run than funding research in new power sources.
I know, it shouldn't be either or in any case, but it's just a thought...
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
The armchair nanotube is great for those lazy electrons who put up a lot of resistance to doing work.
So if that electron in your life is giving you heat about the pressure they are under this new product from LazyBoy is the perfect gift for them!
Someone's gotta find a way to break the $2000 mark for speaker cables that some arrogant ass will insist makes the whole sound experience worth it.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The most essential thing about a superconductor isn't the zero resistance, but the meissner effect. So if they manage to create wires with near-zero resistance, they will not have created `near-superconductors'.
For energy transportation and storage it doesn't matter all that much, cause zero resistance (even without superconductivity) would make energy transportation and storage better
There was a discussion yesterday about using LEDs to replace incandescent lights. One thing that came up was the power losses associated with stepping down the mains voltage to voltages required by LEDs.
Even if the carbon nanotubes are not technically superconductors, if their resistance is much lower than copper they might be ideal for low voltage home wiring. You could step the mains down to 5 or 12 volts in a central location in your house, and power the all your low voltage electronics without having to worry about I^2R losses.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_16 /b3929120_mz018.htm
From the url:
"Even though such transistors are still in their infancy, says IBM's Avouris, "Carbon nanotubes can get around most of the problems that doom very small silicon devices." In the lab, he has backed this statement up. It took him four years to assemble his current, third-generation prototype of a carbon nanotube transistor, but in the end, the device can carry up to 1,000 times the current of the copper wires used in today's silicon chips, making it vastly more efficient."
Actually, it's called a ballistic conductor. There is a small resistance when electrons pass through the ends of the nanotube, and while it is traveling along the rest of the tube there is no resistance.
what sig?
I'm at Rice University, and I can tell you what the real situation is. Smalley has DARPA and NASA money to try to do something he calls continued growth: to take an existing carbon nanotube, and increase its length in a gas-phase chemical vapor deposition process. They are having limited success. Don't go buying your space-elevator stock yet.
Separately, Smalley and collaborators have been working on spinning fibers from ropes of nanotubes (basically short (less than 1 micron) tubes bundled together by van der waals forces). Those are the fibers that can be meters long. These fibers do not consist of meter-long tubes!
Finally, metallic nanotubes are not room temperature superconductors. In fact, they are not even ballistic over length scales larger than a micron. Smalley's habit of implying otherwise is really annoying to any physicist who knows anything about these systems.
Now, a long fiber of only metallic nanotubes would still have conductivity better than copper at much less the weight, and would therefore be very important industrially if it could be made economically. There is a huge difference between that and having no electrical resistance, though.