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Rice Contracted to Provide NASA's Quantum Wire

Posted by timothy on from the soon-will-be-in-vending-machines-for-a-nickel dept.

geekman writes "NASA is paying Rice University $11 million to build a prototype quantum wire that can conduct electricity 10 times better than traditional copper cables at one-sixth the weight. Rice has four years to build a one-meter-long quantum wire, which will be made out of carbon nanotubes. Seems like a lot of money for a little wire, but then again, all the rocket scientists at Los Alamos have only ever been able to put together a four-centimeter nanotube."

15 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. More poorly spent money... by physicsphairy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    NASA is paying Rice University $11 million
    Rice has four years to build a one-meter-long quantum wire,

    Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put out a bounty on this wire? Instead of the four year plan, you get the "everyone scrambling to complete it first" plan, and as a bonus, even when someone collects the bounty, all the research done by other institutions still stands.

    --
    When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
    1. Re:More poorly spent money... by grumpygrodyguy · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put out a bounty on this wire?

      Not really, too much risk. It's an unevaluated process. Besides, how many companies would enter? Ten, 150? You've got better chances winning the world poker tour. Bottom line, everyone who isn't first place gets burned and left with a huge bill, no patents, and no $11Million.

      --
      The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
    2. Re:More poorly spent money... by aptenergy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure, but most universities won't have the experience to do it. Smalley won the Nobel Prize for his work with buckyballs (carbon-60, buckminsterfullerene, fullerene); carbon nanotubes are rods with essentially the same structure as buckyballs (the capped ends are two halves of a fullerene, iirc). Rice is obviously a leading pioneer in the field, nanotubes are Rice's specialty, and there's no reason to have a bounty when you have a Nobel Prize winner working on it.

    3. Re:More poorly spent money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No, it wouldn't. For someone whose name implies a connection to academia, you sure are naiive. What department would let a professor hire research assistants based on his confidence he could win a prize? Rice (as you should know) is a particularly well-suited university to do the work, based on the fact they pretty much invented the area.

    4. Re:More poorly spent money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've heard that Rice is one of the most productive sources of research into nanotechnology. They've gotten this grant because they are qualified for it. This isn't something that you can do without funding so if there were a bounty all of the competitors would still need large grants in order to do the research.

      Also the bounty would result in even more infighting than is usually seen in the scientific community.

    5. Re:More poorly spent money... by geekoid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      good point, but nows the RnD is being done with public money. this means the data will be public, and then anyone can take the info and start there own company.
      If it was a bounty, companies would retain the rights to not only the carbon tube, but the process and discoveries which could have other applications.

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    6. Re:More poorly spent money... by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bottom line, everyone who isn't first place gets burned and left with a huge bill, no patents, and no $11Million.

      No patents? That assumes this quantum wire can be constructed in one step. If it's more than one step, you can patent everything along the way even if you never get the final step complete -- such as making it feasible at room temperature or something. And, in failing, you might find something that works for other applications. Read up on the history of the Post-It for one such example.

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    7. Re:More poorly spent money... by fermion · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This is called "basic research." It probably won't work, and if it does, will be far beyond even a VC event horizon.

      Any money for this would come from the government through the grant writing process. The number of labs who have a C-60 reactor, and have good control over it, are still reletively small. Not to mention the ability to characterize and sort.

      This is not like, say, the space plane, in which most technology is 5-10 years old and all that was required was a bit of money for engineering. These are molecules that really do not yet exist in huge quanities, and putting them together is not well understood. Hell, even the theory of how they conduct electricity is younger that superconductors, and just see how many of those we have around.

      Rice and NASA have a very good working relationship. Rice has some of the best people to deal this type of Nanotechnology, plus enough other funding to leverage this small amount of money into a working product.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    8. Re:More poorly spent money... by Java+Ape · · Score: 2, Insightful
      PhysicsPhairy: Surely with a name like that you're familiar with the way academia works. Paying a bounty for a development worked well for things like the X-prize, but it basically attracts high-rollers with a dream looking for some recognition. The prize wasn't as large as the total expenditure of the winning team, and the losing teams are simply out of luck, financially speaking.

      Primary research is both time consuming and expensive. When looking at a long-term, money intensive projects, requiring a ton of intellectual horsepower the Ivory Tower becomes the valuable contractor. However, even though grad students are basically indentured servents, they still require stipeds, and a well-equipped lab is costly to manintain. If you want a prestigeous school to dedicate a portion of it's lab space and intellectual muscle to solving your problem, there is a price to pay.

      Frankly, I'm amazed and delighted to see the government funding a bit of basic research. It seems like over the past 15 years or so we've shifted to funding only near-term applied research expected to boost profits for some contributing corporation in the next six months. I know too many high-energy physics PhD's who are working help desks to pay the bills. Time to get back to work!

  2. Re:Ballistic Conduction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    I believe this refers to the ballistic conduction that takes place in carbon nano-tubes and is a quantum phenomenon. Basically electrons experience a small resistance entering and leaving a nano-tube, but then near zero resistance travelling along them.

    Exactly zero along them, IIRC. This "conducts electricity 10 times better" thing must be talking about the resistance at the required 1 meter length. They've got O(1) resistance, and normal wires have O(n) resistance. A constant factor only makes sense at a constant length.

  3. Re:Ballistic Conduction by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 4, Insightful
    1-dimensional quantum systems have special properties. The charge carriers in 1D wires are not holes or electrons but instead are collective modes that have quasi-long-range order and carry the spin and charge of the original electrons as separate modes. This is kinda bizarre and has no analogy that I know of outside of quantum mechanics, but it gives 1D conductors rather unual properties.

    One of these properties is that the resistance scales logarithmically with the length (not constant, the GP is incorrect). It is still remarkable though, because all other conductors have a resistance that scales linearly with the length (which seems intuitively obvious - but is wrong!).

  4. Re:Further strains on my loyalty to my alma mater? by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Weight may not be a factor, but flexibility is. Traditional superconductors are ceramics, where breaks between domains ruins the transmission. Carbon nanotubes, OTOH, would be flexible, and could be routed in manners than relatively rigids ceramics couldn't. The would also be more resistant to failures due to flexing.

    It would be interesting to know the weight of the wire in current launch vehicles, as every kilo less of copper wire is a kilo more of payload you can lob into orbit.

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    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
  5. 60 times better? by Jherico · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As far as I know conductivty is a function of the cross section of a wire, which scales linearly with weight.

    So 10 times better at 1/6th the weight should be the same as 60 time better as copper, or that it conducts the same as copper but at 1/60th the weight. Or 20 times better at 1/3rd the weight. Who's deciding this? I feel like I'm reading an article on futuristic wiring technology, but can't be trusted to deal with any number or fraction that involves a number larger than 10. Fuckers.

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    Jherico

    What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"

  6. Try test equipment by slapout · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seems like a lot of money for a little wire

    You've obviously never priced oscilloscope probe wires before. :-)

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    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
  7. Re:How much for a space elevator cable? by serutan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The space elevator people at LiftPort expect carbon nanotubes of unlimited length to be available and cost-effective in 13 years. Whether they're right or not is anybody's guess, but the progress from a few nanometers to a few centimeters is 4 orders of magnitude in 4 years -- leaves Moore's law in the dust. Just 3 more orders of magnitude and they'll be in the tens of meters, and at that point I bet they'll be able to make them pretty much any length they want.