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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.
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.
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
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
replacing nearly 10% of it with another element must mean that it falls into another classification.
An alloy, if you will?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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"
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