Slashdot Mirror
New Type of Superconductivity Spotted
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from a story about research into an unusual form of superconductivity:"Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field — or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. The advance may not immediately lead to new gadgets and applications, but it suggests that superconductivity, which has already netted four Nobel Prizes, may be an even richer phenomenon than previously thought."
Whenever there is a talk about superconductors, the first question that gets asked is at what temperature would we get resistance free material. Its application in gadgets, or even the funding for in depth study of Type 1.5 superconductors would hinge around that question.
Face your daemons!
It may have involved superconductors, but I think they were trying to do something with gravity at first. Hence measuring the change in weight of the object in the box, before they found the box's other properties.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
A room-temperature superconductor would be nice, but even with today's superconductors a hell of a lot can be done...in space!
With all this talk of inter-planetary space travel, space provides the right temperature without expensive cooling systems. Simply insulate the superconductors from direct sunlight and you get great applications like passive superconductor magnetic bearings and other cool oddities that you would only get with expensive cooling systems here on earth.
Space isn't really cold... And any heat built up would need to be radiated away, not removed through conduction or convection. I'm not very well versed in this all, but I expect these limitations would actually make it hard to do all that much with...
actually, it could be very easily conducted away using some material, and then radiated (from heat sink-like things).
and to think, i could get modded insightful sometimes if i bothered to use proper sentence structure...
It may have involved superconductors, but I think they were trying to do something with gravity at first. Hence measuring the change in weight of the object in the box, before they found the box's other properties.
I hope people aren't modding your post interesting thinking you were talking about TFA rather than the movie I mentioned.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Heat buildup from what, electrical resistance?
It's sometimes hard to see it from Earth, but it turns out there is a really large glowing ball out there sending heat in a directions.
I, for one, wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out God created bisexual superconductivity. :-)
Be relentless!
Actually, one of the tags currently on the story as of this writing, "dualactionscience" is both brilliant and humorous at the same time--and unlikely to offend anyone. I think it's appropriate. In fact, I'm still laughing about it nearly ten minutes later! Bravo to the individual who thought that one up.
He who has no
A hell of a lot can be done with todays superconductors without the added expense of launching them into space. The point of room temperature superconductors is to get them cheap and ubiquitous.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The shade will heat up, then emit IR radiation, which is the light that causes that heat in the first place. All bodies radiate, how much depends on their temperature.
Not a sentence!
I shall answer this by invoking the usual "fixed it for ya" slashdot mantra, thus:
"I, for one, don't need to wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out the devil created bisexual superconductivity in a vain attempt to tempt them away from the lord."
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Temperature is the wrong problem to focus on. Liquid nitrogen is relatively inexpensive & easily handled. With a good insulation system, it costs very little to keep it liquid. The real problem is that despite lots of industry & government involvement, high temp superconductors are still expensive to manufacture & not easily turned into wires.
Even at that, you can ignore space or room-temperature superconductors.
Right now, there are a considerable number of devices that require superconductors at liquid nitrogen or liquid helium (~2 K) temperatures. You won't find them in your home, but you will find them everywhere at the cutting-edge of scientific research (medical imaging, particle accelerators, etc.)
The prospect of being able to make these devices cheaper, smaller, or more powerful is extremely enticing to the operators of these devices. Cooling something with liquid helium is insanely difficult and expensive.
If a device requires liquid Helium, you can be assured that its operators have extremely deep pockets, and are funding research to eliminate or reduce the need for liquid Helium cryogenics. To say the least, maintaining a device at 2 Kelvin is rather costly.
If the LHC could run at room temperature, it'd cost a mere fraction of what it does.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If your application requires charging up and down electromagnets regularly, that boils helium regardless of how good your insulation is. You'd much rather be boiling nitrogen.
While they're currently expensive there are a lot of applications that just use a small amount of material (and low current and low field, which can be a downside at high Tc). For example, SQUIDs that can be cooled with LN2 instead of helium cost way less to operate and are just as good.
Heat doesn't travel through a vacuum.
Er... what? Heat can pass through a vacuum perfectly well as electromagnetic radiation. I was warmed from the sun today.
Not only that, but superconducting Monster Cable interconnects would ensure that your music gets from your CD player to your receiver without any of the bits getting tarnished.
This space available.
Actually, he's just being pedantic.
Thermodynamically, heat is a property of a body with mass (I'm ignoring quantum fluctuations here, and averaging over time), measured as the average vibrational energy with respect to the degrees of freedom of a body's constituent matter. (As we approach absolute zero, the wavelike aspects of matter makes this less sensical; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a property of waves, means that position becomes very indeterminable as momentum becomes well-defined. We don't need to worry about this much, though, when studying basic thermodynamics.) Photonic energy is generated by any hot (meaning above absolute zero, which everything in the universe necessarily must be, by definition) bodies in a radiative process and absorbed by adjoining bodies.
This is why most people think IR is heat; however, is the orange glow of a flame heat, or is it the radiative light given off by the combusting fuel and air/oxidizer?
Radiated IR is not heat. It is the body radiation of matter that is undergoing the motive process of being in any hot state. Collisions among molecules, ions, and bonded and unbonded atoms are not perfectly elastic; sometimes one of the particles will be pushed to a higher energy state, and this is energy is subsequently radiated as a photon.
Kinetic energy (classically m*v^2/2) and photonic energy (h*nu) are both forms of energy.
(Posting anon because I know a physics expert is going to come in and nitpick and make me look... like a retard *grin*)