Slashdot Mirror
New Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K
myrrdyn writes to tell us that a new superconductivity record high of 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F) has been recorded. According to the article this is the first time a superconductive state has been observed at a temperature comparable to a household freezer. "This achievement was accomplished by combining two previously successful structure types: the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223. The chemical elements remain the same as those used in the 242K material announced in May 2009. The host compound has the formula (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy and is believed to attain 254K superconductivity when a 9223 structure forms"
If you have some time to read, I'll explain my vision for the future: If we put solar panels across the desert, we'll need to have a transmission line to get it to places where people live. I reason that a super conductive line would do the trick. It is costly in terms of energy to cool the lines, but if you have an excess of energy to begin with, it could actually cost less than the loss of power you get in copper lines. Basically you just leech off the super conductive line for cooling.
The demand for energy will only increase with time regardless of conservation efforts, and this isn't a bad thing. The more energy we have, the cheaper transportation and food is which in turn lets people have more money for charity to help people who need food. So creating a surplus of energy soon could have worldwide benefits instead of just keeping up with demand.
I have a second vision that goes along with solar in the desert and superconductivity lines. It is tidal/solar near the coast, to fuel up hydrogen tanker trucks. These hydrogen tanker trucks could run on hydrogen themselves and take the energy inland. In the same processing plant that creates the hydrogen from electricity, they could also produce clean water for countries that need that as a critical resource.
Both of these visions takes a little bit of technological advancement, but not too much from what we have. My key question would be: Would this new superconductor be possible to mass produce, and could it be used as a new transmission line?
God spoke to me.
Wow. I'll bet the guys at Cern are feeling pretty foolish right about now.
May the Maths Be with you!
Reaching room temperature super conduction would bring huge benefits to modern day technology. Power usage of chips would plummet to almost nothing and allow a brand new generation of processors. Amongst several other very useful things.
If this structure is anything like the other high temp superconductor, it is a ceramic, which can hardly be used as a cable conductor.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
we're talking room temperature
a few more simple crystallization process tweaks
we're talking desert weather
change the fabrication and assembly process like this and that, add layers of this material and that material:
ductile materials rather than ceramics
seriously, it will take a lot of hard (nobel prize winning) effort, but there isn't a shred of doubt in my mind that by my old age at least, materials scientists will give us cheap, high temperature superconducting wires
which changes everything, and has implications everywhere, in avenues of possibilities none of us have fully thought out, but plenty of us are excited to try
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From TFA:
This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research.
Amazingly cool. (No pun intended.)
But better yet, not cold!
What is "the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223?" And I don't believe there's an element known as Oy.
...it is a ceramic, which can hardly be used as a cable conductor.
You mean except for the ceramic cables that are already in use? I think your "information" may be a wee bit out of date.
Cool stuff.
Some cursory research suggests the following applications:
-- electric motors, possibly for vehicle propulsion
-- maglev devices
-- magnetic refrigeration
It sounds to me like the primary application of superconductivity is in devices that incorporate magnets. Medical imaging devices like MRIs may also be affected by this discovery.
All of this is due to the fact that superdoncuting magnets produce stronger magnetic fields than conventional electromagnets and are cheaper to operate
...makes you think, doesn't it?
You want me to believe a wildly high superconductor Tc claim using a link to a shady website that looks like it was designed in 1996, without any link to a paper or an author, without any reference to where the discovery was made, without any notes about secondary confirmation, without any other reference in the media except one lamo blog and without any real formal publication at all? Here's what every physicist reading this article right now is thinking: STFU. If you get a near room temp Tc superconductor working, you better be on the front page of a rushed to print edition of Nature that someone just ran down the hall to shove in my hand, or I'm not even going to give you the time of day.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Why waste all the time, money and materials to drag out miles upon miles of superconducting "wire" to get from the generation site to the end user?
"254K should be warm enough for anyone"
satan is reported to start funding his own superconductivity laboratory
This achievement was accomplished by combining two previously successful structure types: the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223. The chemical elements remain the same as those used in the 242K material announced in May 2009. The host compound has the formula (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy and is believed to attain 254K superconductivity when a 9223 structure forms
Ok. I now physics and chemistry. But WHAT? Those numbers make no sense, and is about the most useless quote ever quoted on slashdot. And that's saying something.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology#1999_CNN_interview_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_received_by_Al_Gore#2007_awards_and_honors
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a long way from practicality, particularly for applications requiring bulk materials. They don't say what fraction of the material was superconducting, just that it was low, and the compound itself is pretty unstable: "The copper-oxides are strongly hygroscopic. All tests should be performed immediately after annealing."
The linked page, looks like its from a amature research group, and none of the earlier results, from 200Ks up, have been confirmed in the mainstream. The offical world record temperature is 138K, still in liquid nitrogen range.
----
Super Conductor feed @ Feed Distiller
This links to a website in which a private guy touts his own research. There are a few references to publications by others but the alleged "discoverer" doesn't seem to have published any articles. If this was legit he'd have plenty of paper in Nature, Science, PRL, Phys Rev A etc. Can't the editors exercise a modicum of common sense?
Where's the bullshit tag?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
This means superconductivity is possible without any equipment just about any January day in Winnipeg MB.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It it wasn't obvious before, this "no patents" sentence should have made it obvious to you that the guy is a crackpot. This guy is making materials with Tc 100K higher than the rest of the world and he publishes on his own website instead of Nature and Science? Come on -- if any of his previously claimed discoveries had any grain of truth in them he'd have won an immediate Nobel prize; this would be far more important than the CCD.
No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
Are you suggesting then that work in high temperature superconductors will have few applications? That is, this work is intended to further theoretical progress to develop an understanding of the underlying reason that substances superconduct at all?
And here I was trying to combine 90210 with 8675309...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
This is great but unless you manufacture the compound in large quantities commercially in a form that is useable e.g. a wire, it isn't going to make much difference to the average person in the street. I would imagine that is still decades away.
It's the new 133t.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I wonder if this superconductor is 'warm enough' that you could create practical underground/undersea conductors now? I mean, granted, it's not that cold underground, undersea, but this conductor is high-temperature enough that I suspect you could create a refrigerated 'housing' for the conductor, and manage to keep it cold enough underground or undersea. You wouldn't run the power the 'last mile' with such a superconductor, most likely, but perhaps refrigerated conductors would be suitable for connecting power plants to substations and other distant grids?
Now, why would you want such a superconductor? Because, wouldn't it be awesome, if you are an electric utility, to sell your 'off peak' electric capacity to another continent whose timezone puts them in 'peak demand' for that timezone, so that you get higher rate per hour than you do selling locally? (Granted, this doesn't help consumers any, but if you are a producer, this would sound like a no-brainer). If you could cost effectively connect all the continents with a superconductive grid, a producer in North America could sell power to Hawaii, Japan and SE Asia, Europe, former Soviet Republics, Africa, wherever, and vice versa.
I hear Iceland has more geothermal power than they could use. I bet they'd *love* to export power (maybe they already do?).
It's much harder than it used to be. You used to be able to get the peace prize for bombing children in a country that you never declared war on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
Oh my word!
My web domain.
Achievement Unlocked: 50G - Combine two previously successful structure types.
...of Fleischmann/Pons.
I actually noticed the original source research on the web a couple of months ago, and it should be mentioned that what these guys are creating is not a bulk material that you can pop into a freezer and levitate magnets over or whatever.
Their strategy is to produce a mix of many different variations of their target substance by carefully crystallizing it so that slightly different ratios of the constituent elements turn up in small crystals that are a part of a larger aggregate. They then test the conductivity of the mix as they lower the temperature. If any one crystal superconducts, then they observe a small drop in the conductivity graph at that temperature. With complex mixes, you get multiple drops, at different temperatures. They pick the highest temperature at which they observed a drop, and they try to isolate the crystal.
This method is very clever because it lets experimenters test a large number of related compounds 'in parallel', but what it doesn't do is provide a method for actually making bulk quantities of a discovered compound. It's almost like those mathematical proofs, where you can show that a solution exists, you just can't actually determine what it is. In this case, making significant quantities of the pure superconductor might be quite challenging, possibly harder than finding it in the first place.
On the other hand, once they do succeed, we'll have superconductors within the temperature range achievable with solid-state chillers like the Peltier Coolers familiar to overclockers. That's big. If the superconductors have decent max current limits, expect superconducting power-electronics to be commercially available in 15 to 20 years.
So what would happen if we used these superconductors as traces on say a motherboard? Would it be faster/better? We could just build it to put into a chest freezer. Also handy for cooling off the beer quickly.
How about a large amount of nuclear power plants located in Antarctica? We could heat the ice in standard water pressure reactors and use all of the power produced to charge up massive superconductive batteries that could be stored at room temperature (room temp in Antarctica) and basically consist of a loop of superconductive material. We could then take the large loops of superconductive material by ship to various locations and feed the power into the grid. We could ship electricity everywhere with power generators that are certainly NIMBY, safe, and with enough superconductive material able to provide a massive surplus of several years worth of the world's electricity.
So you could go to the shore, and pick up a coil or two of a lot of electricity (power lines could take it losslessly to the shore from the more inland nuclear power plants). You could with enough superconductive material build up as much of a surplus as needed. You could have ships that are largely just freezers and superconductors take the power anywhere in the world where it's needed.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
wow, that is superbly sketch.
It's easy to fall for such a well-constructed hoax. The abstract certainly looks real. But look deeper: that same guy has been announcing new world records every few months! He's been releasing out of his own site, never publishing any details, never linking to secondary confirmation.
Just look at the method of production: mix some raw ingredients, heat up, and you've got a superconductor!
Don't fall for it people. It's all a hoax. You have been deceived, go home.
If they build a heart valve out if this stuff, my ex might actually wind up living forever.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...I can have my veggies floating around in the freezer!
Do I have to turn in my geek card now? I don't understand the summary. :-(
You're reading that chart wrong.
27% of all energy used is rejected as part of the electric generation process, which by the chart looks to be more than 68% of all energy actually used to produce electricity. Unless those numbers are quads, in which case the percentages are pretty close since the chart represents nearly 100 quads anyway.
That figure includes, presumably, waste heat, coupling losses, overproduction, transmission losses (not necessarily in that order, but waste heat is the lion's share).. It doesn't go into detail.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Just to put it into common terms, -2F is about a thousand times warmer than my ex-wife's soul.
That could be cooled by my ex-girlfriend's vagina!
When your website is just a few font sizes shy of TimeCube, you've lost even me.
Insanity has a specific smell and that guy's site reeks of it. It's different from manic-depressive, from which real and useful innovations can arise. This guy just seems nuts.
But that's just the smell test. If somebody can reproduce his findings in a meaningful way, I'd be the first in line to shake his hand. Until then, I trust my nose.
-FL
He created his webpage with Netscape 3.0, running on Windows 95. Wow.
Anyone else have the impression the author of the summary had no clue about the subject and just took the original document and threw away the words he understood to produce his gibberish summary?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
What leaves me slighty skeptic about this are the following considerations:
1. Previous high temperature superconductors have all operated below 110K, approx, the record being 138K; with a critical temperature of 254K we are talking a jump of some 140 degrees.
2. The site, www.superconductors.org, seems strangely anonymous for a scientific news medium; no affiliations, no references, nothing.
3. We haven't heard anything from anywhere else. If this was real, it would have been all over the national and international news media; we would see Nobel prizes pouring in, ecstatic world leaders dancing in the streets etc. Obama has been remarkably calm, as far as I can tell, so unless he is one cool dude, he is not ecstatic.
All in all, I don't think this is credible.
I don't see these results reported anywhere else. And the highest reported superconducting temperature is still 138K according to Wikipedia, all claimed improvements afterwards seemed to be made by the same group, strange.
there's this crazy new thing they just built called the laser. it pumps out spatially coherent light
so what?
"I keep hearing stuff like this, but seriously... what sort of implications are people talking about? What difference would it make to the average person, for instance?"
room temperature superconducting has at LEAST as many far reaching implications as the laser does. as for what they'll do with it? i don't think they imagined CD players in 1960, so i'm not going to hazard a guess what they'll do with superconducting room temperature. but its obvious room temperature superconducting puts all sorts of fundamental new electrical properties in easy reach
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I thought most energy losses in chips were in the actual transistors rather than in the wires? Now, if they find a way to make this stuff switch very quickly between "superconducting" and "very good insulator"...
That's easy, just heat the junction, and voila! a new gated-thermal-resistor-super-conducting-transistor is born.
to the inventor of this new "superconductor":
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sincerely,
-Inigo Montoya
The plots of voltage measured across the sample do show a noticeable and possibly significant drop which occurs repeatably at a certain temperature. As the inventor states himself, this drop is most likely due to a specific crystalline structure change occurring in the material.
Superconductivity occurs when the resistance of a substance drops suddenly to a value almost immeasurably greater than zero.The resistance of this new alloy does not drop to anywhere near zero, therefore it is NOT a superconductor at that temperature.