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Silicon Superconductors
Diana writes "Physicists at CNRS have demonstrated superconductivity in silicon, the element long known for its semiconducting properties. High doping is the key — by substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms, it was found that the resistance of the material drops sharply when cooled below 0.35 K. A small increase in the transition temperature is likely with further work."
But you can make pretty much anything superconductive if you get it down below .5 Kelvin. I mean really, go much lower and you can make Twinkies superconductive much less boron doped silicon.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Superconductivity in non-superconductive materials, except where they've been doped to be superconductive.
Makes me want to get back to the pub.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
What non-consumer applications will it have? Getting something down to
IIRC, anything that doesn't superconduct at the temp of liquid nitrogen is a pain in the ass to use.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
whatever that means!
And just to make the article more clear: Let's substitute "boron" with Tom (hey, what guy wouldn't want more boron?), and "silicon" with Suzie (hey, what girl woudln't want more, eh, yeah.).
"Because it has one fewer electron than Suzie available for bonding with neighbouring atoms, Tom incorporated into Suzie leaves a positively-charged "hole" at each site where Tom's "missing" electron would be paired with one of Suzie's."
Well they did do it in France, you know.
One should not always relate things to 'applied' science. There is a predecessor called 'pure' science that acts as an enabler for rest of the world. Sure average Joe doesn't care but it is a significant improvement in the scientific world. Now many critical research can be performed on "silicon" (although at insanely low temperature). Remember the time when there were only few elements in the world that exhibited the property of superconducting? Now Silicon is yet another addition and considering how Silicon is closely related to computing, this could be a jump board for the speed-demanding future ahead.
Um, lots of people care. The MRI machines use super-conducting material cooled with liquid nitrogen, this might make them more efficient. Plus, when I've got my Mag-Lev skate board, you're gonna think I'm pretty cool too. Even if I
am in space.
BTW, 0.35 K = -272 C
Space is around 2.7K or, -270 C (Assuming no Extraneous Radiation)
I'm fighting The War on Drugs!
If we can turn semiconductors into superconductors, then we can probably turn my band conductor into a semi-conductor, which would at the very least mean less thrown chairs during parent teacher conferences, and less thrown chairs can only be good for Linux!
(Yes, that happened; and yes, he is still in band director.)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Since when did science have to have applications?
(This isn't sarcasm; science is about discovery. Applications of those discoveries are mostly accident. You can't automatically "succeed" at science. Failing to find a room-temperature superconductor isn't failing per se; it means succeeding to eliminate another coulda been material. Finding dead ends is part of the quest. And this result might not yet be a dead end.)
So far, most of the comments have been posted by boring morons.
-A bored moron
Who cares? People who are trying to work out how superconductivity happens so that there may been room temperature superconductivity some day - that is who cares. Please keep the profanity to yourself as you play in the garden and let the Moorlocks get back to it.
But you must admit, getting an object to 0.35 K from 3 K is a lot easier than bringing it from 300 K.
Boron was made superconducting by doping it with 90% silicon.
I work on a radiotelescope that uses receivers cooled to 4K. These use a helium refrigerator that works just like the Freon thing in your car but using helium instead of Freon as the phase-change medium. It takes three stages of cooling (with compressors and heat exchangers) to get to the 4K point. It also takes 10 kW of electrical power to cool one watt of load to 4K.
We until recently had one receiver, a bolometer, that was cooled to 0.4K using the 3He isotope of helium that has a lower boiling point. The refrigerator for this is a fist-sized gadget that uses a charcoal trap, a heater resistor and some plumbing to make a refrigerator that can be cycled to produce 0.4K for a day or so at a time. It makes many microwatts of 0.4K coldness from less than one watt of 4K coldness.
Unfortunately, the 3He leaked out and the gizmo is currently a paperweight since it was made by a very clever French guy who's no longer in the business.
You can still buy 3He refrigerators from other manufacturers, but they are two feet long. The 3He is available for several thousand dollars a bottle.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It's just a process of discovery to advance science. If we didn't go through these scientific processes of discovery then we would still have people running around thinking that everything was controlled by some big booming voice in the sky. Oh wait...
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Yes, 0.35 K is really cold. Refridgeration methods that reach this temperature cost ~ $100,000 and use the helium-3 isotope as the working fluid, which costs several hundred dollars per gaseous liter at STP. But this may still be useful because there is lots of established technology for making very small things out of silicon, and lots of fundemental physics that can only be done at very small length scales and in very cold environments.
The only thing worse than an aggressively ignorant idiot is a foul-mouthed one.
In the 1830s, it was discovered that some materials acted as neither pure conductors nor pure insulators. They called them semiconductors, and they were a curiosity until the 1890s, when they were found to be useful as rectifiers and photovoltaic cells. Another 40 years later, and people started to consider them as a replacement for the triode vacuum tube, which was immensely useful but fragile and difficult to deal with.
Pure research in new directions isn't just allowed because it 'might lead to something,' it's absolutely essential in order to progress beyond refinement of the existing.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I tried super-doping myself but it got boron after a while.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I've been watching too much of the original Battlestar Galactica. With their "centons", "sectons", "furlons", "crawlons", and of course "Cylons", when I saw the term boron, my first thought was that it was some sort of unit of boredom. Then I read the article, and realized I was right.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So I guess Pamela Anderson is more useful than we thought! Other than the obvious, of course. ;-)
Pretty much anything will superconduct below 0.35K. How is this news?
Actually, no, many things do not superconduct at arbitrarily low temperature, common examples being some of the best room-temperatures conductors we know of (eg copper and gold). Pure silicon also does not superconduct, as explained in TFA, which was known for some time.
As for this being news, well it interests me because I do experimental research with superconductors. But I'm surprised it made the front page of slashdot.
make world, not war
No. You are wrong. Read up about blackbody radiation. Space is like a big cavity with blackbody radiation that's about 3k. That's the thing about electromagnetic radiation - you don't need a medium. Let me make it clear... If you brought a piece of metal into space, would it keep cooling off by radiation? No. Why? Because at 3 kelvin space would be giving it as much energy as it is shedding. The pipe and space would be at an equilibrium state when the pipe reached 3 kelvin. You see how this is real temperature? Good.
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
I can do things I normally can't when I'm doped, too.
Property is theft.
Not really. No one makes a 300K->.35K cooling device. Put simply, you take a 3K->.35K refrigerator and set it inside a 300K->3K refrigerator. Since any lab or plant that is doing this sort of work already has the 300K->3K unit, using said unit is a trivial addition to the process of using the new "low temp" unit.
Wikipedia has an explanation.
The electrical resistivity of a metallic conductor decreases gradually as the temperature is lowered. However, in ordinary conductors such as copper and silver, impurities and other defects impose a lower limit. Even near absolute zero a real sample of copper shows a non-zero resistance.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Some years ago, evidence for superconductivity was found in a gallium arsenide epitaxial device. The work was duly published, and only some time later was it realised that the superconductivity was occurring in metallic indium on the back of the device - the indium had been used as a good thermal conductor for mounting the GaAs substrate in the epitaxial growth chamber, and had not been completely removed.
If these guys have done their work carefully, they will have gone to great lengths to ensure that they really are measuring doped silicon, and not boron-rich precipitates, which might be formed at these very high boron doses.