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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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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.
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
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.
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.
So, lets say this eventually becomes a common technology (doubtful, but lets pretend). When do we get to stop calling them 'super'conductors?
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Never, because the physics of super conductors is different from regular conductors, and regular conductors are never going away. There are many, many circumstances where having resistance is necessary, and for that you need a plain-ol' conductor. Also I think we're safe from creeping-superlative-itis because you pretty much can't get more "super" than "effectively zero resistance".
And what's so hard about remembering all the types of DOS memory? "Conventional" was the kind that you never had enough of to launch your games. "Extended" memory was a baroque and stupid way of accessing all the extra memory you had that the chip couldn't address directly. "Expanded" memory was the same thing, only different. "Upper" memory was the memory your chip could address but refused to let your games use. And lastly "high" memory is when you were editing your config.sys autoexec.bat to get more conventional memory but you got distracted thinking about how funny it would be if
The enemies of Democracy are
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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- 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.
Actually, it is quite hard to cool things in space, if they generate any kind of heat. You can only radiate heat away - conduction and convection won't help you.
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
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.
Run a few loops of it around the equator, put a big enough current through it and you could put Magnetic North on top of True North, where it bloody well should be.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...