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Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-that-cold-anymore dept.

StarEmperor writes "A team of Canadian and German scientists have fabricated a room-temperature superconductor, using a highly compressed silicon-hydrogen compound. According to the article,"The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.""

21 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Room-pressure? by atomicthumbs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it also a room-pressure superconductor?

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    1. Re:Room-pressure? by ILuvRamen · · Score: 1, Interesting

      you know how much pressure that must take?! You keep the mollecules from vibrating wildly enough just by pressure instead of like -400F degrees. That's insane. Oh well, I won't mind seeing this technology die cuz I don't think we have the spare silicon to redo the power grid in this...or one city.

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    2. Re:Room-pressure? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Once compressed and held inside a silicon (or other) wafer isn't it feasible that it will retain its shape and pressure and properties?

      This sidestepping means you can take it out of the lab without having it tethered to a fridge or anvil.

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      liqbase :: faster than paper
    3. Re:Room-pressure? by elronxenu · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IANASE (I Am Not A Superconductor Expert), but that sounds reasonable. There will not be superconducting wires of this stuff, at least no wires longer than microscopic scale.

      If scientists can figure out how to make transistors from this stuff and use it to link those transistors together inside a chip then we might get CPUs which can massively exceed current clock rates.

      The huge disparity between on-chip clocks and bus/memory clocks will increase the pressure on Intel and AMD to push as much circuitry on-chip as possible. The practical limit on that may turn out to be cooling requirements - how much heat is generated and needs to be removed from the chip.

    4. Re:Room-pressure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I do seem to recall that computers *started* by requiring pressure regulation. Vacuum tubes were low instead of high, but we also have plenty of experience with that.

    5. Re:Room-pressure? by inKubus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What if they can build a long one with a carbon nanotube lattice around the outside, which self-compresses when streched (sort of like one of those Chinese finger-traps). Then you could have a material which becomes superconducting when you stretch it, say between two telephone poles or something.

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    6. Re:Room-pressure? by Yvanhoe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The observer is a lie !

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      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  2. Applications? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know Michael Flynn, in his novel Firestar had some of his whizbang young people contributing to a new space age by developing superconductors that work at room temperature, but he never said what exactly superconductors do in space travel. What exactly new technologies will we see built on this?

    1. Re:Applications? by mbessey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Super-strong electromagnets are one application of current superconductors. There are a number of uses for such magnets in space, from reaction engine control, to ion thrusters, to magnetic "sails", to gathering fuel for a Bussard ramjet.

      Magnets can also be used to direct dangerous radiation away from ships and the crew, in a phenomenon similar to the cause of the auroras that light up the night skies here on earth.

    2. Re:Applications? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Also: Mass-driver reaction engines. (Electric catapults using asteroidial debris for the "exhaust".) They work much more efficiently if you don't have resistive losses in the wiring and coils. (But rapidly changing the current through a superconductor is also problematic...)

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  3. Its a bomb by slashdotlurker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air. Plus, how are you going to put conductors under great pressure ? The main attractiveness of super conductors lies in long distance electrical supply lines. Unless they come up with a way to hermetically seal the "wire" over distances of hundreds of miles with a seal that can withstand high pressure compressors dotting the landscape (unlikely), this very interesting advance will remain just that - very interesting.

    All not counting whether it is more energy efficient to run superconductors with energy hog compressors or to just stick to what we have, hopefully realizing practical room temperature superconductivity.

  4. Please hold your breath and run... by Detritus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Silane is pyrophoric and boils at 161 K. It may be a while before this leads to practical results.

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    1. Re:Please hold your breath and run... by mother_reincarnated · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Just think of the cool failure modes! Queue the hypersonic jet of solid silane sublimating a second later into a raging inferno...

  5. Re:Umm... by dotmax · · Score: 3, Interesting
    That's a good question. As they say, "more research is indicated". It might be a dead-end, and it might be a gateway to something fabulously useful.

    On an grim note, i happened to notice a distinct lack of American presence in this announcement. Seems to be a Canadian/German thing. Y'know, that science stuff the US is running away from at full tilt (i work at a large US atom smasher that, like a *lot* of other Big and L'il Science Thangs, got a major budgetary wedgie this year). At least i still have my embarrassingly huge penis.

  6. worth a read by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You might find this worth a read in considering the future of science in the US.

    1. Re:worth a read by CrazedWalrus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Thanks for the link. It's a great read.

      This just reinforces my idea that the internet came along at an absolutely perfect time to save America from itself. As these wonderful-sounding yet completely impractical ideas continue to pervert and destroy our academic institutions, the internet will necessarily play a larger and larger role as an alternative to "traditional" learning venues.

      Many of us technologists are mostly self-taught when it comes to our professions -- particularly sysadmin and programmer types -- because the technology was available and the communications infrastructure just adequate that we were able to get the learning tools we required to equip ourselves for our career. Many of us then went to school already knowing the better part of what was necessary for our careers.

      I propose that people like this were the pioneers of internet learning, and that, as academic institutions continue down their strictly regulated politically correct paths to irrelevance, people who really want to learn will do so online in the world classroom.

      I'm not saying that's ideal. I'm just saying that, if special interest groups and politicians looking for a soundbite get their way (and they will), it might be the only way, short of leaving the country altogether.

  7. Buckytubes as containers? by otis+wildflower · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if these molecules would fit within carbon buckytubes, and if those tubes could withstand the pressure required for room-temp superconductivity without exploding into organic compounds?

  8. Re:Umm... by gardyloo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Because you can maintain a given pressure without the continual input of energy. Temperature (in either direction) has the annoying habit of doing its best to match that of the ambient environment. Pressure has that annoying habit, too. After all, nature always likes to smooth out gradients of any sort. We just know how to deal with gradients of pressure a little more reliably than with those of temperature.
  9. Business perspective by Simonetta · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Slashdaughter geeks tend to get overexcited at the potential of major breakthroughs, like a room-temperature superconductor. In order to make a difference in the quality of life, these breakthroughs have to be supported by hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in upgrading the existing infrastructure.

        For example, the best use of superconductors at the present would be to prevent the loss of enormous amounts of electricity between the power-generating stations and the home users. The percentage of energy lost is huge is this area. But the money simply isn't there to rebuild the electrical infrastructure to take advantage of this new superconductor (even if it did operate at standard temperature-pressure).

      This is the same situation with all major new technologies, like high-percentage efficiency solar cells, etc... There is this hope among technologists that the incremental efficiency gains seen from implementing new technology on small scales ('Green' buildings, individual hybrid cars, cold light bulbs, etc...) will create a 'snowballing' effect where the money saved by the new technology will more than offset the cost of its manufacture and installation.

        That was true in the 20th century in the era of cheap oil, but it isn't true anymore. And with the crisis of climate change and the permanent endless wars caused by overpopulation on the horizon, it is even less likely to happen.

        All the incredible technological change and advances of the 21st century will do little more than keep a small percentage of the world's elite living at quality of life that was accepted as normal in 2000. It's a hard truth to come to grips with, but the sooner that you can integrate it into your geek consciousness, the easier that the adjustments will be for you as the 21st century's harsh new realities unfold themselves.

        The 20th century is over. The money is gone. The cheap, easy oil is gone. The brains and spirit of unbounded hopefullness of the 20th century is fading rapidly. Enjoy life while you can, and don't give any more of your money to Steve Jobs or the RIAA.

  10. Re:But... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Theoretically if you compressed the beer to 3 billion atmospheres it would taste cold, if I'm interpreting the article correctly.

    Actually I found this article

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen#Discovery

    In March 1996, however, a group of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported that they had serendipitously produced, for about a microsecond and at temperatures of thousands of kelvin and pressures of over a million atmospheres (>100 GPa), the first identifiably metallic hydrogen.[3] ...
    The scientists were surprised to find that, as pressure rose to 1.4 million atmospheres (142 GPa), the electronic energy band gap, a measure of electrical resistance, fell to almost zero. The band-gap of hydrogen in its uncompressed state is about 15 eV, making it an insulator but, as the pressure increases significantly, the band-gap gradually falls to 0.3 eV and because the 0.3 eV is provided by the thermal energy of the fluid (the temperature became about 3000 K due to compression of the sample), the hydrogen may, at this point, effectively be considered metallic.

    Even stranger it might be possible to make Metastable Metallic Hydrogen

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen#Fuel

    It may be possible to produce substantial quantities of metallic hydrogen for practical purposes. The existence has been theorized of a form called 'Metastable Metallic Hydrogen', (abbreviated MSMH) which would not immediately revert to ordinary hydrogen upon the release of pressure.

    In addition, 'MSMH' would make an efficient fuel itself and also a clean one, with only water as an end product. Nine times as dense as standard hydrogen, it would give off considerable energy when reverting to standard hydrogen. Burned more quickly, it could be a propellant with five times the efficiency of liquid H2/O2, the current Space Shuttle fuel. Unfortunately, the 'Lawrence Livermore' experiments produced metallic hydrogen too briefly to determine whether or not metastability is possible.

    Since it's ultradense hydrogen, I wonder if you could use it in a fusion reactor? The Wikipedia article says cautiously that 'increased understanding of the behavior of hydrogen in extreme conditions could help to increase [inertial confinement fusion] energy yields.'

    Actually another more mad scientist idea that occurs to me is this. Suppose you want to build a self replicating Bussard Ramjet. It's a big fusion reactor running on interstellar hydrogen, which doesn't seem to be a promising material to build things from. But if you could make metallic hydrogen that helpfully super conducts, that does seem like something you could build from.

    And over the reproductive life of a Bussard Ram jet it will encounter enormous amounts of it. They could harvest dust too and separate it into elements with something like a mass spectroscope. So they have the raw materials to reproduce with.

    The idea is that you send out one jet and tell it head for likely wormholes On the way it will build more ramjets and they will head for likely wormholes, fly through them, deduce the rules for wormhole travel and head back to Earth. You'd tweak the program so that only a small percentage of the population try to fly through a wormhole, since the journey may destroy them.

    If it all worked you should send out one jet and get lots back in return. Plus they have a map of wormholes and could have used their sensors to find alien civilisations anywhere (and anywhen) they visited. You can fly the ramjet to visit aliens in say ~100 years ship time. Someone worked out you could circumnavigate the universe in 50 years ship time at 0.999c. You need to accelerate and decelerate of course (the latter may require some clever engineering;-).

    To

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  11. How much pressure? by Gorimek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It doesn't say how much "super pressure" is.

    If a power cable at the bottom of the ocean is under enough pressure, it could be very useful.