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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."
Is that they never seem to be where you left them. Although on a good day you'll end up with more than you started with depending on what universe you're in.
Seems like a lot of money for a little wire,
;^)
Yeah, but it's still cheaper than Monster Cable.
How long until some eccentric billionaire pays Rice to wire his entire house with that stuff?
"My house is iced out with quantam wiring, biatch. Or something. Bling bling."
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.
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how are they supposed to land on quantum power lines!!
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Condi Rice can build anything, she is one of the jewels in Bush's hat.
Don't tell me you didn't misread the title at first either!
carbon nanotubes...that's awfully similar to the Inanimate Carbon Rod.
They're nuclear scientists, not rocket scientists, dammit. Give'em a break!
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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.
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For those who didn't read the past article on quantum wires, here it is.
And for those who don't know what an armchair nanotube is, here are some images (The armchair nanotube is the one in the middle).
These things could be the next revolution after fiber optics for network communication, so there is reason to be excited. I wonder if there would be too much interference to run these things in a twisted pair configuration.
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Yes, they are.
A metallic carbon nanotube carries 4 quanta of current (4 charge carriers at a time): 2 conducting channels, 2 spins per channel. That's what NASA is referring to as a quantum wire.
Most of the resistance in such a wire is due to the fact that only a very few number of charge carriers can be transmitted at any time. The electrons going through the wire do not lose any energy in the wire, as there are no available lower energy states for them scatter into, and only two possible directions of motion (foward and backward). Thus, a perfect nanotube can be thought of as a "ballistic" conductor. There is some resistance to putting current into it and getting it back out, but in between, there is no resistance in the normal sense. (Although this sounds a little like superconductivity, it is definitely not.)
In a real nanotube, there are defects, contact resistances, impurities and environmental factors which act as transmission barriers, raising the probablility that an injected electron will reflect back to the source and not make it all the way through. It will be interesting to see how the Rice guys plan on annealing or growing their meter long wire to maintain the desired properties (and that's where the money comes in). Simply weaving a bunch of small nanotubes together is not going to cut it.
I'm sitting about three blocks from the Rice Campus & I'm a Rice grad, so pardon me for cheering 'em on.
This actually makes (some) sense - Dick Smalley & Robert Curl on the Rice faculty (and a 3rd guy in England) won that trivial little prize - the Nobel in Chemistry for basically inventing/discovering the buckyball and related carbon nano stuff - or something like that. I also seem to recall that Smalley also has done pretty well in acually being able to manufacture buckyballs.
Also, there is a long history of collaberation between NASA and Rice. Starting before the Apollo program. I had a professor at Rice who designed experiment packages that went to the moon in the Apollo program.
So, if NASA was going to award a contract or grant to somebody for this, Rice does make some sense.
Also, kind of interesting that President Kennedy gave the famous speech "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." on the Rice campus.
Carbon nanotubules, when properly, manufactured could also have very high tensile strength. Many times stronger than stranded steel cable and weighing less as well. This is the technology people what it use to build the space elevator.
Of course, after proof of concept there are still many challenges to cost effective manufacturing.
There are a dozen revolutionary uses for super wires. But first we need a proof of concept. FYI - I'm looking for a job at a well-funded nanotech startup. Many qualificiations, inquire within!
Let's just hope the kids at Rice don't get confused and wind up making a ridiculously large model of a quantum wire instead.
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I'm sure there's some outfit in Audiophile magazine that will sell you "quantum wire".
I hear it gives you really crisp trebles.
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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.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Ummmm, dude, NASA is the one setting up the grant. That would imply that they're thinking about using it in spacecraft, satellites, probes, etc. where weight is a huge fucking deal.
From TFA:
Sorry, but you missed the point by about a lightyear.
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Actually, it is easy to get into space. You just need to stand still and let the earth move away from you.
Oh well, what the hell...
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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Seems like a lot of money for a little wire
:-)
You've obviously never priced oscilloscope probe wires before.
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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.
I'm a current Rice student, and one of the running jokes about all this nanotech stuff here on campus came from our student newspaper writers. Take two bucky balls, and one long nanotube, and fuse them together with a few bonds and you get: PHUCTANE All the students in orgo were completely phuc'ed after that.
Hell, even the theory of how they conduct electricity is younger that superconductors, and just see how many of those we have around.
As an aside, superconductivity is now very well understood. It's just that the race for a room-temperature superconductor has stalled out. In those fields where they can afford to keep the superconductors below critical temperature (e.g. NMR/MRI machines), superconductors are very widely used.
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