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Nanoclusters Break Superconductivity Record
KentuckyFC writes "A couple of years ago, two Russian physicists predicted that metal nanoclusters with exactly the right number of delocalized electrons (a few hundred or so) could become strong superconductors. Now an American group has found the first evidence that this prediction is correct in individual aluminium nanoclusters containing 45 or 47 atoms. And they found it at 200 K (abstract). That's a huge jump over the previous record of 138K for a high-temperature superconductor. There are a few caveats, however. The result is only partial evidence of superconductivity and the work has yet to be peer-reviewed. But its mere publication will set scientists scrambling to confirm. And 200K! That's practically room temperature in the Siberian winter."
Maybe not room temperature, even in Siberia: by my advanced calculations, 200 K = minus 100 F (or -73 C).
But still very exciting.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
Not everyone lives in a "-ium" country. And IUAPC swings both ways. Get used to it.
with my desktop cold fusion apparatus, and i can power los angeles from my basement!
seriously, i hope this pans out. this is earthshattering. if they can successfully scale the production process, combined with its functionality with cheap and nontoxic aluminum, then cheap room temperature superconduction in the general public will occur in our lifetimes, with all of the neergy saving and future device classes that this breakthrough implies
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you prefer the slang version it's "GODDAMMIT" or "GODDAMNIT", there's no entry for your "GODDAMIT" in urban dictionary. Or if you wish to be proper, there's always "God damn it". Get used to it :).
Heh. You linked to:
Aluminium
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aluminum redirects here.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
[quote]It's "aluminium". Get used to it.[/quote] Maybe where you come from...
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Great! lets start an attraction park in north pole and build superconductor based rides!
i'M serious btw
put up no resistance...
oh never mind. the idea was Russian but the result was in the US
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Carbon dioxide ( or dry-ice ) is bellow 195K at standard pressure, so this material wouldn't even need liquid nitrogen for cooling. If this can be made to scale it would without doubt give countless of applications.
Isn't that like a "strong" Superman?
What would that make a "weak" superconductor? A conductor?
Yours sincerely,
- Puzzled, Intartubes.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It looks like the size of this is pretty darn small (Figure 1 shows plots of heat capacities determined for aluminum cluster anions with 43-48 atoms for temperatures below room temperature. At that size, it's not particularly useful except when creating tiny electronics. I'm not sure you can string together these tiny atom clusters and get the same effect. Sadly that means we can't send power across the country without significant energy loss.
...everyone knows the right number of nanoclusters is 42!
In sovt. russia, metal nonoclusters conduct you !
That's -73.15 celcius, or -99.67 Fahrenheit. 294.3 Kelvin would be a very comfortable temperature for superconductivity, I wonder if I'll see it in my lifetime?
Coldest Temperature (North America): -81.4 oF/-63 oC, Snag, Yukon, Canada, February 3, 1947
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That is the number range for exact ?
>>There are a few caveats, however. The result is only partial evidence of superconductivity and the work has yet to be peer-reviewed. But its mere publication will set >>scientists scrambling to confirm If slashdot has taught me anything lately, it's that "partial evidence" and "yet to be peer-reviewed" = bullshit. Without getting overly trollish about it, the coolest news of the moment that isn't true and isn't news....isn't all that cool...? There's still some great content, and I'll keep coming back as long as the +5 comments keep cracking me up...but the vapor seems a little thick these days.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
key phrase: "...Now an American group..."
When your country makes the breakthrough they can spell it however they'd like.
Why the hell would you want to pronounce that highly awkward, useless and redundant fifth syllable? We've spent centuries over here cleaning up the English language by expunging extraneous letters and normalizing spelling to match pronunciation. Much has been accomplished, but more needs to be done. Get with the program.
(in a deep Northern Brittish Accent)
Those Americans, they aught to talk proper, like what we does
The original calculation of 0C=273K was determined in 1848.
The more precise value of 273.15K was measured and adopted in 1954.
Given the equipment and knowledge available in 1848, I'm quite impressed with the accuracy of the original calculation ( 0.1%).
Max.
You've got it the wrong way round btw. Americans use an older form of English, in general, and so words which are archaic in British usage are used in the USA (normalcy being one classic example). So the Brits actually have been going around adding letters, rather than the Americans removing them.
For instance, a usable superconductor has to be able to tolerate a strong magnetic field, i.e. substantial current. Plenty of alloys are superconducting but cannot carry much current.
And very basic: temperature is a very hazy concept when applied to a small cluster of atoms. What's the acceptable range of energies? Very significant.
wuh-hi the hel wood u wont to pro-noun-se that hi-li ok-werd, u-se-les and ri-dun-dant fifth sil-a-bul?
Yeahhhh because English really cleaned up its spelling didn't it? If it were a concerted effort to clean up strange spellings you wouldn't have gone after the letter u and ium words before taking on 'knife'. The reason america is wrong isn't because of how it is supposed to be spelled (from a pronunciation point of view). It is because the rest of the world spells it differently. Its like using inches and feet in a metric world. Get with the program.
you do realize the british use miles right? In the UK you get both meteric and English imperial units. Some things are commonly done in one other's are commonly done in the other.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
However, it's really unclear if it's possible to make a BULK superconductor out of this. The effect depends on a nanocluster having the correct number of atoms. Once you put two together you have - a nanocluster with the wrong number of atoms. Which is to say, a little piece of aluminum. Perhaps you could have a bunch of cluster that were separated enough to be weakly coupled so you could maintain the superconducting state, but allow current flow. But there's a whole lot of "ifs" between here and there.
What I find exciting about this is the ability to theoretically predict the properties of nanoclusters (to say nothing of fabricating and measuring them.) Understanding nanoclusters is a step in the direction of engineering bulk materials from first principles with the characteristics you need. You know how much time and effort went into discovering Halfnium as a component for a dielectric in transistor fabrication? Imagine if that could have been discovered by running a supercomputer for a while until it found the compound with the desired properties. THAT is where this will ultimately go.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
on Mars!
.."is" 200k in Soviet Russia... in the summertime! aaa ha ha ha!
(note: this is the variant of the ISR joke where you insert something and then "is this something in soviet russia... in the summertime! AAA HA HA HA)
stuff |
mod parent up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sorry, but I have a speech defect which prohibts me from intong the second "i" in any one word.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
when do we have a working stargate
You know, if it weren't for us and our aluminum, you'd be talking about "das aluminium" right now.
It's been fifty+ years, let it go. :)
Oh to have mod points... bravo, sir!
nature.
Boiling has to do w/ molecular excitement due to pressure gradients. If you take that water, and boil it in denver, You'll find no amount of exact measuring will come up w/ 373.1339 K
Please, remeber that sea level is a relative thing only to earth.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
...that room temp was defined by the temperature people prefer indoors.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these clusters...maybe that's a strong superconductor?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
If it werent for us and our sailing ships, gunpowder and steel youd still be eating grass, living in caves and speaking Cherokee.
Well, it's crap. So it must not be Scottish.
-
The well-known removal of "u", the conversion of s to z in "yse"/"yze" words, reversal of "re" words to "er", and shortening of words that end in "amme" to "am" was started in America by Mr. Webster. Certain particular words in the US may be more archaic, and I've heard but cannot verify that the accents in the American South mapped to fairly common English accents at the time far better than modern English accents. But it's really mostly Americans removing letters. Some of which make things less clear, in my opinion. Why does analysis go to analyze instead of analyse? The etymology certainly supports the 's', and the sound itself, when I say it, is sort of middling between a 'z' sound and an 's' sound anyway. And color -- the o's have extremely different pronounciations each time. WTF. I'm sure you can find plenty of other uncontested words like that, but it's still aggravating (even if color is more etymologically sound, colour is the older English-language representation).
Surely, a composite made from superconducting nanoparticles would not be superconducting (though it may be a good conductor). So what use is a superconductor if it has to be so small?
Also, they measured a dramatic change in heat capacity @ 200K, which may be an indication of a superconducting phase transition. It also may be some other phase transition. They're still looking for direct evidence it's a superconducter.
No, we'd still be in Europe, scrounging for scraps and yearning for wide open spaces.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
English humor "what we does" is grammatically incorrect
A north england accent isn't Scottish (think Bolton / ee by gum, emphasis on the o's and u's, "bloody hell", sounds like "bluudy 'ell")
"Now an American group has found the first evidence that this prediction is correct in individual aluminum nanoclusters containing 45 or 47 atoms."
They're wrong. The right number is 42. It's obvious.
Northern England, isn't in the Northern part of Britain either.
But they still have a monarchy... they have a right to imperialism! But their children (The Commonwealth) are mostly up to date and modern, using the auspicious metric system almost exclusively.
"It's crap being Scottish. We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shown to civilization. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, were colonized by wankers. Can't even find a decent civilization to be colonized by. --Mark, in "Trainspotting"
Am I the only one misinterpreting this as 200 kilo (degrees - either Celcius or Kelvin, there's practically no difference)?
You know, that's a pretty strange way of writing "alyuminii".
Right.
While my comment may have been humourous, it was meant to draw attention to the ignorance exhibited by the use of statements such as 'British English'.
The parts of Britain other than England - ie Scotland and Wales - actually have their own *languages*.
Just because people in Scotland and Wales choose to mostly use English, doesn't change 'English' into 'British'. It also doesn't change the meaning of 'English', since it is from and belongs to the English. A more accurate term would be 'English English', but that's just tautological.
Of course, "English" is also from Britain since England is part of Britain, and so "British English" is technically correct. However, English is also from Europe, but no one calls it 'European English'.
What's next, "Terra English"? "Milky Way English"?
Oh, no - can't have those terms because the areas (volumes?) also include the USA (and other places) whose inhabitants use "forks" of the English language.
Rant, rant, etc.
Max.
It's "aluminium". Get used to it.
So you're saying it's also "tantalium", "molybdenium", "platinium", and "lanthanium"? Get over it.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Not how I read it.
...and everywhere else uses 'Aluminium' or analogies thereof.
The reference says :
1) 'Aluminum' predominates only in the USA.
2) It's 'prefered' by the Canadian Oxford dictionary.
3)
4) The IUAPC recognises 'Aluminum' only as a 'varient'.
wrt 4) - that's not what I call 'swings both ways'.
More like "I'm distinctly heterosexual, but someone showed me a picture of a naked man once. I threw up, but I did see it".
Max.
I'm sure that's true for some words, but I wonder about 'Aluminum'. Wikipedia suggests that the first use was 'alumium' - ie kind of 'in between' and it sort of wavered thereafter.
Max.
However, unlike the Americans, in general, the English don't, in general, actually add letters so much as allow the language itself to change. Why would the English care? It's their language after all - they have nothing to prove. The Americans, of course, had to prove their independence.
Wikipedia, however, does suggest that 'aluminium' is one such example of someone choosing to add a letter. I'm not sure how reliable that information is, and I haven't followed the references.
Max.
Of course, we will never know what 'would' have been.
However, initially the US was, in some capacity, a supporter of Nazi Germany, and, as I recall from 'somewhere'[1], only forced into the war when the British forces started sinking US ships and blaming it on the Germans.
Talk about sitting on the fence and rushing in at the end to be the hero.
[1] I would quote Wikipedia, but saying 'somewhere' seems to be just as authoritative.
Max.
Well, the imperial system comes from there, so it's gonna take longer to switch.
That's not an excuse. They are wrong to take so long to switch too (IMO). It's just a reason.
Max.
Right.
I have no objection with the American's changing the spelling to make more 'sense' - for some definition of 'sense'; but, lets face it, they completely cocked it up.
I mean, at least be thorough. Why not get rid of all silent letters for a start?
Max.
To quote Wikipedia :
"The -ium suffix had the advantage of conforming to the precedent set in other newly discovered elements of the time: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium"
That's a good reason, isn't it?
OK, OK, so it does go on a bit further....
"Nevertheless, -um spellings for elements were not unknown at the time, as for example platinum, known to Europeans since the sixteenth century, molybdenum, discovered in 1778, and tantalum, discovered in 1802."
The '-iums' seem to vastly outnumbers teh '-ums', and I notice that the the '-iums' aren't close to the 'Al' in the periodic table at all. Perhaps that's something to do with it.
Max.
As electric and cooling costs continue to rise, I wonder whether there will be good economic case for locating superconducting datacenters towards the poles (or atop mountains) because it takes so much less power to keep them running so fast. With ever more automated datacenter ops, they might be airdroppable into really remote locations, with fiber bundles or redundant satellite radios linking them to the Net, without needing human operations staff (and the power they consume for their 100F bodies).
--
make install -not war
in the future they just call it 'al' because they're too lazy to type in aluminium or aluminum on their cell phones. it's sad but true. people talk entirely in acronyms, I've been guilty of it myself, more so when i was on irc. FWIW firefox uses aluminum as it's official spelling, although wiki goes the other way.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Although, I have to wonder what you mean by 'official'.
Max.
Guys, there's such a thing as style, and you lot ain't got it.
(OK, so neither have I, but there you go)
Max.
According to this page http://superconductors.org/185k_pat.htm the previous record was actually 185K and it points out the the coldest recorded temperature on the planet is 183.95K. What is actually more exciting (to me at least) is the new non-cuprate superconductors. They are fluorine doped RFeOAs (R = rare earth) with Tc ~ 40-50K. This will hopefully give insight into the mechanisms of non-BCS superconductivity.
Maybe that's how you do it in English. But I speak American.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Brits (and a handful of others) also drive on the left side of the road. While Europeans and Americans drive on the right hand side. Is one way better than another? Probably not.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Then please explain the silent 'c' in Connecticut; and the vast difference in pronounciation between Kansas / Arkansas. Some consistency would bolster your argument.
Is this a rhetorical question?
Yes well you can't exactly drive internationally unless you are referring to the internet. When in rome (in this case the international community known as the internet) do as the romans do. Its the same as when you print scientific articles you use the metric system even if you are in the states. That said I think you are getting a tad anal when you complain about aluminium ... colour maybe but w/e
Notmysig
Not that any mods are paying attention to this thread any more, but this "Score:5, Insightful" post is based on a faulty premise. Bulk material of these clusters would conduct thanks to the Josephson effect.
But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth; it also went to Harvard.
by official, i mean 'default on ubuntu 7.10 linux, having chosen 'chicago' timezone.'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
And modding is imperfect at sorting out truth from falsehood. Don't sweat it so much. The discussion's the thing.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.