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Rice Contracted to Provide NASA's Quantum Wire
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."
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.
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!).
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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
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.