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Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor
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.""
Is it also a room-pressure superconductor?
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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?
So, how exactly is this a good alternative to colder superconductors? Pressure is often more expensive to safely maintain. Not to mention the fact that SiH4 autoignites at room temperature.
Like Leonard Bernstein, for instance?
Researchers in Fairbanks, Alaska have just created a room temperature superconductor.
the scientists, that is...
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
I think you missed the point. Not Cool!
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
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.
Silane is pyrophoric and boils at 161 K. It may be a while before this leads to practical results.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So how long before we get to pay several hundred dollars for high-pressure, superconducting HDMI cables that take our HD viewing to the "next level"...and also spontaneously ignite if they are chewed on by the family pet?
The hard part's done: We found a supercompressed gas (boiling point -161F) that superconducts. The next step now involves finding something electrically similar (think lead oxide + aluminum versus iron oxide + aluminum. Ignite iron oxide + Al and get Aluminum Oxide and iron and heat; ignite lead oxide + aluminum and get deadly lead gas + aluminum oxide + about 50 times more heat). Find the right chemical properties (solid until 500C?) on an electrically similar compound and you got yourself a deal.
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So, lets say this eventually becomes a common technology (doubtful, but lets pretend). When do we get to stop calling them 'super'conductors? When the super becomes the common, is it still super? Like the evolution of memory classification in DOS. Before the advent of the NY kernal, I spent considerable time trying to remember the difference between conventional, extended, expanded, upper, and high memory. I think the main reason DOS gave way to Windows was Microsoft ran out of superlatives....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'm holding TFA (Science, 14 March 2008, pp. 1506-1509). The highest critical temperatures they observed, regardless of pressure, were around 17 Kelvin (between 96-120 GPa). These are interesting results because they are among the few measurements available to shed light on the behavior of dense hydrides at these pressures, and these materials might, if better understood, one day allow a room temperature superconductor to be made. This, however, is not it.
God damn you for the headline "Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor". I almost fell of my chair in excitment. Then my climax was rapidly stolen when I read that it required high pressures. Next time, try to replace typical news sensationalistic headlines with pertinant headlines. In this case "Scientists Create Room Temperature but High Pressure Superconductor".
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
You might find this worth a read in considering the future of science in the US.
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?
give it my job. There's more than enough pressure.
You mean like Scott Weiland?
Not to mention the fact that SiH4 autoignites at room temperature.
Also: I hear silanes (beyond n=1) are VERY toxic.
Back in my undergraduate days my chemistry teaching fellow was doing research on them. He claimed that the ones he was working on were so toxic that if you could smell them you had already exceeded the fatal dose.
(Now he might have been feeding me and the rest of the class a line of bull. But I wasn't about to argue with him. It WAS his thesis project, which implies that he should know what he was talking about. And he DID grade the class, after all... B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
- Efficient motors (think electric cars and perhaps even airplanes and boats);
- Zero loss of power while sending it all over North America (or Europe, Asia, etc).
- Heck, we are looking at hitting coppers limits. If this comes to be, then the use of copper will decrease and we will see a drop in price of that. The amount of copper that goes into large motors is pretty big.
- Just thinking about it, it might even be used for electric storage.
- Maglevs might become practical.
Besides, think of where we were 20 years ago; roughly 20 years ago, physicists had found a way to increase the temp. Those wires are now being used for short distance tranmissions. This could change everything.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Call me when they actually have something that superconducts at room temperature. The article was very vague about what they actually did, and had a lot of phrases like "perhaps without a refrigerant", and "potential superconducting materials for industrial applications". I'd like to know more about the "experimental confirmation" briefly mentioned in the article. Sounds to me like it's mostly theory that was over-hyped by an author who doesn't know what he's writing about.
Zienth
About 20 years ago I watched them building a silane bunker where I worked. What a blast, figuratively speaking. Several layers deep of woven re-bars, zig-zag re-bar stitching between the layers. Concrete walls poured around them 1.5+ feet thick. Weak roof - any blast was supposed to be directed upward. A fun construction project to watch, whenever one had to walk past.
Incidentally, just how much magnetic field can this superconductor take. Temperature is only one Achilles heel of superconductors, the other is magnetic field.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Combine the room-temp superconductor plus the motionless CPU cooler, throw in the fact that scientists success corrolates to beer (three stories from today), and you just might have colder beer.
Layne
Well, maybe this works at room temperature at The University of Saskatchewan, but down here in tropical Michigan, we still have significant work to do!
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
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
The more is that the researchers have shown that silane turns into a metal at very high pressures; while researchers have not managed to create metallic hydrogen, they have managed this. The less is that it's only a 17-degree Kelvin superconductor--not an extraordinary temperature--and the pressures involved are on the order of half a million atmospheres.
The original article was published in Science on 14 March 2008; Vol. 319. no. 5869, pp. 1506 - 1509; DOI: 10.1126/science.1153282. Your local library can probably get you a copy; if you are at a university you may be able to access the online version.