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A New Family of High-Temperature Superconductors
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.)
"God only knows where it will go," says one Nobel Laureate.
They found the Higgs boson?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Here (PDF warning) is an in depth look at high temperature superconductors, especially the cuprate families, for those not well versed in the subject.
I got a catholic block.
The "firestorm" was ignited by the discovery of cuprate semiconductors, which "have critical temperatures in excess of 90 kelvin"[1], which is above the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
This is assuming standard pressure, of course. Any advancement in the operating temperature of a superconductor would make it easier to pressurize a system in order to bring its operating temperature up.
Well there is a huge difference in the price for using Liquid Nitrogin vs. Liquid Helium. Right now for superconductors used in MRI's they use Liquid Helium at 4k. And they use Liquid Nitrogin as an insolator to protect caseing from cracking. At roughly $1000.00 per leter of Liquid He, Liquid Nitrogin is much cheaper. Anf if they can get to a point where you can maintain superconductivity at Dry Ice level it would cause far more advances in society.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
as well as paving the way for practical magnetic levitation
Awesome! Can't wait for my superconductor magnetic levitation bed!
You just got troll'd!
A big goal is to get superconductors to work at 77K, because then they can be cooled by cheap liquid nitrogen. Lower than that, you have to use liquid helium(I think) which is quite expensive.
..........FULL STOP.
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.
1. "High T_c" is a technical term. Indeed, 55 kelvin is "high" (though not as high as the record for cuprates). You have to compare it with the typical T_c for metals (a few kelvin). The difference is between liquid helium temperatures and liquid nitrogen temperatures (which cuprates have reached already and perhaps the new compounds also will).
2. More improtantly, this will ignite a "firestorm of research". You see, we don't have a good model of high T_c superconductivity (unlike the BCS model for metals). Having several different superconducting systems will help theorists isolate the significant features of the system from the less significant ones.
3. Seeing superconductivity in a totally new material is exciting. This is interesting basic research even if today we dont' have a practical application. If we don't do the research we'll never get to the practical stage.
Didn't we just see a far warmer superconductor just a little while ago?
Not to mention this one operating at 200 kelvin.
I feel kind of bad for these guys doing their research and coming in 150 kelvin behind everyone else.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The article specifically mentions 138 kelvins as the highest temperature where cuprates still hold on to superconductivity. That's roughly -115 degrees celsius. This greatly increases the viability of the material by greatly reducing the energy required to hold it at a critical temperature. Think about the wide extent to which liquid nitrogen is used.
Currently we are in the stage of trying to understand just what exactly is going on at the particle level. Once we move past this research stage (disclaimer: it's been going on for twenty years), the possibilities these materials provide are pretty much endless.
I got a catholic block.
I know of at least 5 superconductor power lines installed in the USA.
The important point was getting over 77k, where the relatively cheap liquid nitrogen can be used instead of other things like liquid helium.
I don't read AC A human right
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
looks a bit too low for "practical" implementation yet.
At this point people are more interested in the physics rather than the practical applications.
This discovery is pretty important, because as TFA says, the exact mechanism that allows high temperature superconductivity to occur isn't widely agreed upon. Another system to study makes it much more likely that theorists will agree on exactly how this works.
And we all know that communists never lie.
Yeah, how are we going to 'fend for ourselves' without superconductors? :O
which is totally what she said
If you think China is a poor third world country then you are going to be shocked.
China is mostly a second world country, isn't very poor(the USA is spending trillions there), currently is almost able to duplicate just about every technologically advanced device being built.
there was a chinese company called NEC which duplicated the Real NEC's tv's poorly but close enough to work for several years before they got caught.
While it will be another 5-10 years China is rapidly building up technology, science, and math. They have the manpower power and will, just like japan had 30 years ago. Remember 40 years ago the Japanese only made junk, 20 years later they owned the electronics market, and 10 years after that had some of the best selling cars out there.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I've always been under the impression that a major reason for superconductor research was to raise the operating temperature to a point where parity (or better) was reached between maintaining a magnetic bottle and the energy gained by a contained hydrogen fusion reaction. I'm guessing that the lack of posts stating "Mr Fusion to be trial-ed this fall" means that liquid nitrogen is too energy-expensive to make this a reality.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Damn girl, you look hot enough to transmit energy in a lossless....hey, where are you going?
there was a chinese company called NEC which duplicated the Real NEC's tv's poorly but close enough to work for several years before they got caught.
Not only did they make the TVs, but apparently they also dealt with real NEC plants on a regular basis, and due to poor organization, nobody caught on.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Are these "not so low" temperature superconductors usable to make semiconductors for computers? Can such a superconducting computer be run at extremely high clock rates, or just extremely low circuit latency, to make really fast computers not limited by the heat inefficiencies of today's regular computer chemistry?
If so, how about building these computers buried in Antarctic ice? Winter air temperature drops to -80C; deep in the ice it's probably even lower. 138K is -211C. So the energy required to cool the superconductors would be much lower than in the usual labs, which start at about 24C - over 100K more than the 120K difference between the superconducting point and the natural arctic temperatures Cooling -80C to -211C should be a lot cheaper and easier than cooling 24C to -211C (though shlepping to the poles and digging isn't so easy or cheap).
The problem is what to do with the heat pumped out, which could damage the arctic nearby, maybe even melt the foundation. But if the total mass cooled is small (like a few dozen microchips), that byproduct heat could be used to keep some human operators alive.
If the arctic is the wrong location, how about launching them into orbit, behind a solar panel shield that powers the device (and its I/O radio) and shadows its temperature into the operating range?
--
make install -not war
Where do you get $1k/L? A quick google search turns up $3-5 per liter, which is about what I recalled. LN2, of course, is much cheaper -- $0.25 in small quantities, $0.05 per liter or less in very large quantities.
Dry ice is more expensive than LN2, because you have to pay for the CO2, rather than just liquefying air. But if you don't actually need dry ice, then dry ice temps are certainly cheaper to reach than LN2 temps.
And here:
US ranked #1 at 3 times the number of papers than any other countries, and 5 times greater in number of citation (five times!)
Doing almost 50% of World's research isn't bad considering we have only 5% of the World's population. Guess that anwers my previous question: at 25% of World's population China was bound to discover something of use sooner or later...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The main reason this research is being done in China is the fact that one has to work with Arsenic compounds. The US has more regulations regarding strongly poisonous elements.
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.
How are creationists ruining superconducting research? (I'm not defending them, I'm looking for more ammo.)
And so as to defend myself, in some fields, like biomedical research, I think the US is still putting out the most and the highest-impact research papers.
How about a break down of how much of that US research is by foreign scientists brought into the US. I'd be willing to bet you'll find it's a significant number. The very fact is that its' been reported all around that scientists and engineers are having to be imported in from other countries because the number of well educated "native" scientists/engineers has been declining.
You've got the right idea, but your numbers are a bit out of whack
Helium is so expensive, because it is very entery intensive to liquify, and it isn't commercially extracted from the atmosphere like nitrogen
Because that was nanoparticles (~40 atoms each), not a solid material. Even if the electrical resistance within the particle was perfect, the resistance from one particle to the next could not be guaranteed.
Last month some team in Germany discovered a "room temperature" superconductor. That's still not terribly useful, though, unless you can build a wire that is safely under almost 4000 atmospheres of pressure required to turn the Silane gas into a solid.
=Smidge=
All these new materials are ridiculously brittle and difficult to form ceramics, so making coils and so forth is a major PITA and helium actually works out cheaper in practice.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Where do you get $1k/L? A quick google search turns up $3-5 per liter
Well duh! He's talking about MEDICAL liquid HE which is obviously much more expensive than normal liquid HE. Ever get a bandaid put on at a hospital?
My understanding is that their lack of malleability as well as their very low critical current density prevents large scale use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YBCO
In fairness most proposals for perpetual motion machines (actually all that I've seen) actually claim decreasing entropy, not just zero change. IANAP but I do wonder if superconductivity will turn out not to be completely lossless but just very very nearly lossless. Of course, in practice we're not talking about closed systems anyway.
Has anyone noticed the disconnect between this topic (superconducting) and the icon (supercomputing) Slashdot is using to summarize this topic? I know they both have the word "super"... and a "c". But the similarities end there.
Supercomputing is all about massively parallel computation, not just computers... nor chips. This article is about condensed matter physics and (who knows?) a possible replacement for the semiconductor.
Got a semiconductor icon, perhaps?
Are you sure there is a voltage gradient across a superconducting transmission line?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I believe you mean -135 degrees celsius.
That last twenty degrees is what keeps Minnesota from superconducting in winter.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Hanging on to our lead, on the other hand, is doubtful: "Cited papers first-authored by Chinese scientists -- an important indicator of scientific creativity -- increased by 25.3 per cent in 2006, and the number of times they were cited increased 28.3 per cent. However, China remains thirteenth in terms of total citation numbers." At that rate, China won't be in 13th for long.
From the global perspective it doesn't matter; all this means mankind as a whole is simply progressing much faster now. But from the US nationalist perspective, this definitely decreases our ability to compete for increasingly scarce natural resources. We've already seen this occur drastically in the price of oil.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: A little from column A, and a little from column B.
I hate printers.
No, actually third world is the only correct usage of the group. The other 2 are Old World (Eurasia) and New World (The Americas).
Third world is so named because it is neither of the other two.
If I recall, they didn't just go so far as to imitate NEC, but even had their own infrastructure set up, and their own R&D set up to allow them to offer devices that the real NEC never did.
I thought the origin of Third World was much earlier. Old World = Europe/Middle East. New World = Americas/Australasia. Third World = The Rest.
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
If you have a transmission line, you have an input and an output, and so you do not have an isolated system. There is not a voltage gradient within a superconducting transmission line (simplistically, V = IR = 0, since R=0), even if you have one at terminals on either end. In fact, measure the voltage at points on a copper wire in a circuit, and you can see that the voltage gradient within the wire is (practically) zero. You can have an apparent violation of entropy pretty easily, if you define your "isolated system" sloppily enough. Just put low pressure on a container of water. The water will gradually decrease in temperature, as the boundary of the water acts like Maxwell's demon, and your container looks like it's violating entropy. The entropy of the universe is still, however, increasing. The difference in superconductivity research and perpetual motion "research" is that superconductivity is reproducible, and superconductivity researchers are happy to disclose their methods, and actively look for a well-defined explanation of the behavior.
Heisenberg might have been here.
Nope, it's pretty much known as dating to the Cold War. India, China ect were all part of the old world i.e. known about before the America's, extensive trade in spices and textiles took place between the two regions.
Foreign-born scientists. There's a big difference here since it doesn't actually matter where they were born so long as they work for us now.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Australia is a third world country??? eep!
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Yes, that is what I meant. But actually it does matter. The very fact that more and more of the US research is being done by foreign-born scientists somewhat mutes the "FUCK YEAH AMERICA!" jingoism when it comes to proclaiming the US as being the center of science/technology research. If another country like China starts nabbing these people up more and more, the US today is going to be less and less in a position to lead with only it's native-born scientists/engineers.
This is a red herring.
I would chalk the lack of advancement up to the lack of need for it. We can point and say, "well, we do need this," but there is no sense of urgency to that need.
Performance happens when pressure is applied. Some societies have instilled within themselves a constant pressure, and apparently progress at a faster rate than others. I imagine that the lack of urgency and impending need is what negates motivation. It doesn't seem like this applies only to scientific research, either.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Actually, 2nd world or new world
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
The big deal with this discovery isn't that the possibilities the new materials they've found are endless. They actually underperform what we already have. It's that we don't understand how what we have (cuprate superconductors) works, but if we did, we could potentially find much higher-temperature superconductors. This gives us a key to help understand high temperature superconductivity. And the possibilities of high-temperature superconductors would be endless (assuming they could be made affordably).
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
Interesting term "firestorm" to describe the interest in this discovery. One is left thinking that the intense firestorm has resulted in pushing temperatures so high that all the superconducting stopped right there.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My web domain.
Most gasses have boiling points higher than nitrogen's, but there's at least one option between cheap liquid nitrogen and expensive liquid helium, which is liquid Neon, which boils at 24.5 kelvin. The Wikipedia article says it's not cheap, but not as expensive as liquid helium, has better refrigeration properties, and is extracted from air rather than rare sources that risk exhaustion.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Then this February, the same group announced an exciting development. The researchers had replaced phosphorus with another pnicogen, arsenic, in the layered material and - boom - the transition temperature shot up to 26 K (Y. Kamihara et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 130, 3296â"3297; 2008). Subsequent tweaking has already boosted that temperature above 50 K. âoeWe all were surprised,â says materials scientist Hideo Hosono, who led the study. It would seem that this research is coming out of Japan, not China.
Does medical liquid HE work like audiophile wooden volume knobs?
Not a typewriter
"Several Chinese research groups quickly found related materials...."
Were those Chinese researh groups at US univeristies or actually in China?
P226
That's always been true, though. America's public school system has always done poorly in world ranking, but its university system is far better and attracts a lot of foreign talent.
In the past, most of that foreign talent tended to stay in the US (like Einstein or Tesla), but that might be changing.
Not a typewriter
Damn woman, you are hot enough to cause a critical breakdown in the finest superconductor...hey, where are you going?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because that was nanoparticles (~40 atoms each), not a solid material. Even if the electrical resistance within the particle was perfect, the resistance from one particle to the next could not be guaranteed.
Familiar with the Josephson effect?
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!