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A New Family of High-Temperature Superconductors

Posted by kdawson on from the mister-nobel-to-a-white-courtesy-telephone-please dept.

sciencehabit writes to let us know that physicists are hailing the discovery of a new type of superconductor as a "major advance." The new materials could solve the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics — i.e., how and why cuprate superconductors work — as well as paving the way for practical magnetic levitation and lossless transmission of energy. "God only knows where it will go," says one Nobel Laureate. After the discovery of superconductivity in an iron-and-arsenic compound at 26 kelvin, several Chinese research groups quickly found related materials that are superconducting up to 55K. (Cuprates go as high as 138K; liquid nitrogen boils at 77K.)

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hot! by ThreeGigs · · Score: 5, Informative

    The excitement isn't about superconductivity at 55K by itself. It's got everyone excited because, *finally*, there's something besides cuprates that superconducts above about 33K (which defines high temperature in the superconductor world).

    Now, instead of having just one 'family' of HTSC materials to base hypotheses and theories upon, scientists now have TWO. Now they can compare similarities and differences between those two families. This gives them a HUGE boost towards figuring out the exact mechanism involved, plus potential leads on new materials that exhibit similar atomic structure which could also superconduct.

  2. Re:US science is dying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you think China is a poor third world country then you are going to be shocked.
    China is mostly a second world country

    "First world", "second world", and "third world" are not some ranking of affluence. "X world country" was an old Cold War term. First world nations were those aligned with the West. Second world nations were those aligned with the Soviets. Third world nations were those aligned with neither. Since the fall of the USSR, there is no longer such thing as a second world country.

    Third world countries tended to be poor and underdeveloped. Now "third world" has become synonymous with "poor", but it is really a misnomer.

  3. Re:Hot! by krlynch · · Score: 5, Informative

    At roughly $1000.00 per leter of Liquid He, Liquid Nitrogin is much cheaper.


    You've got the right idea, but your numbers are a bit out of whack ... LN2 is about $0.10/L in large quantity, while LHe is about $3-20/L, with large variation in price around the world (due to constrained supply and large transportation and energy costs). US He is relatively cheap, as we have a few of the small number of high quality sources. In Europe, He is very much more expensive, as they don't have any local, high quality sources. A recent compilation of costs is available here: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/NadyaDillon.shtml

    Helium is so expensive, because it is very entery intensive to liquify, and it isn't commercially extracted from the atmosphere like nitrogen ... there just isn't enough of it to be commercially viable. Instead, it is generally found in pockets underground and "mined". The helium originates as alpha particles in the decay of radioisotopes (mostly Uranium and Thorium), and permeates through the crust. It gets trapped in high pressure gas pockets by impermeable rocks, in the same types of geology that trap natural gas, and is extracted for commercial scale from those pockets. There are only a few global sources where the concentrations of helium are high enough to extract economically.