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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.
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:
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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
Why? One lab result (not yet repeated AFAIK) does not represent a workable magnet technology. The magnets at CERN didn't even use the highest temperature available at the time of their design in any case; so it obviously doesn't follow that 'the higher temperature the superconductor, the better the magnet'
Enough with the LHC bashing, please. Europe is taking a lead in particle physics, and unsurprisingly being at the absolute bleeding edge comes with some technical pitfalls.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Wow. I'll bet the guys at Cern are feeling pretty foolish right about now.
No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets. That's why they're using liquid helium (or was it liquid hydrogen?) instead of the much cheaper liquid nitrogen -- all the superconductors that work at the warmer liquid nitrogen temperatures will stop working in a moderately strong magnetic field.
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.)
...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.
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
What is "the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223?"
9212/2212C and 1223 are structure names. Would you like an introductory crystallography text with your summary next time? It would, after all, save you the onerous effort of following the article link.
And I don't believe there's an element known as Oy.
O-sub-y, indicating an indefinite ratio of oxygen.
...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?
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.
When combined with the element Vey, it forms Exasperatium.
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"254K should be warm enough for anyone"
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."
superconductors ... will stop working in a moderately strong magnetic field.
If that's the case, I have to wonder about the guys, above, suggesting we should use these for power lines. All you'd need is a kid with a couple of hard drive magnets to bring down a whole power grid. All they'd have to do is tie the magnets together, throw them up to the power line (so they wrap around), and the resistance of that portion of the line would become non-zero. Then, the hundreds of amps of current flowing through that portion of the cable would heat it up (possibly enough to make it explode), melt it, and effectively cut the cable.
Sounds like a good idea to me!
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
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?
All they'd have to do is tie the magnets together, throw them up to the power line
Except that superconducting power transmission lines are likely to be buried along with their cooling systems. There are a couple of places on Earth where overhead superconducting power lines might work year round, but there's really not much call for a power grid in Antarctica.
-- Alastair
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...
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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.
No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets. That's why they're using liquid helium (or was it liquid hydrogen?) instead of the much cheaper liquid nitrogen -- all the superconductors that work at the warmer liquid nitrogen temperatures will stop working in a moderately strong magnetic field.
It's liquid helium. There's a ton of problems with LH2 that nobody wants to mess with.
Regards,
-Bucky
You seem to know what you're talking about, care to clue the rest of us in as to whether the link is at all plausible? Given the nature of the source, I have difficulty believing so.
> No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
[citation needed]
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?).
Oh my word!
My web domain.
Achievement Unlocked: 50G - Combine two previously successful structure types.
...of Fleischmann/Pons.
Actually, the problem is that putting electricity through a wire generates a magnetic field. The high-temperature superconductors are very sensitive to magnetic fields, which quench the superconductivity. Consequently, they suck at getting any significant amount of power through them.
The LHC is an accelerator project, not a superconductor project. The reason their magnets didn't work is down to physical engineering not faulty theory or blue sky thinking. The LHC will still piss all over any other collider project in the world when it's run at full power. They're starting at lower energies to "run it in". They have also advanced the state of understanding in ultra low temperature electro-magnets.
You really have no idea do you. Your average house feeding power cable is 1" thick. You really think that electricity is going to be affected by a couple of poncy hard drive magnets when it has the opportunity to fly down a 1" thick cable ? Why haven't Al-Qaida thought of this ?
> No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
[citation needed]
Hmm, after looking it up, I apparently misremembered slightly. Materials with higher critical temperatures do tend to have higher critical fields, so you would want to use the high-temperature materials to make magnets. But, you can have either high temperatures or strong magnetic fields, but not both.
So you can use "high temperature" superconductors to make magnets, but the mangnets will still only work at low temperatures.
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.
Alas, there's a big gap between knowing enough to snipe at an AC and knowing enough to evaluate the claim itself. Sorry...
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.
My PhD thesis was on studies of these materials. Some things the guy says make it sound like he has some bit of a clue (like the fact that such materials are indeed very sensitive to water). other things he says make him a crackpot (his webpage for instance says: "Since outer space is full of superconducting elements and compounds, I think they could help explain the increasing expansion rate of the universe (through strong diamagnetism).").
Making high purity materials like these takes big expensive furnaces and people who know how to use them (very few in the entire world). The method he describes is unsuitable for making decent single crystals and so his samples will not yield much meaningful bulk information. Working with stuff like Tl is tough because it is so toxic and so making these crystals is doubly difficult, especially in the US with so many safety regulations. Just on that basis alone, it is hard to believe he has the material he says he does. When he says "The volume fraction of this material is very low." it is a huge red flag that he knows not what his sample is. The research community has been all about getting purity up over the last couple of decades and many results with less pure samples did not hold up to these refinements.
As far as physics goes, there is much research out there suggesting that some superconductivity survives in established cuprates above bulk T_c. Even besides that, the electronic states in these materials above T_c are screwed up. My research showed some very interesting electronic phases directly. Thus, a small jump in a poorly evaluated variable may be there but cannot necessarily be taken seriously as an indication of bulk superconducting order even if it is measured carefully.
On top of which, his graphs are your typical crank type graphs. What am I supposed to conclude from voltage vs. temperature? How is that related to resistivity? What are the units? If the material is just synthesized, then how is crystal structure already known? Which beamline was used?
In short, wake me up when one of three or four reputable sample growers (BSCCO crystals are mostly grown in Japan btw, and Tl stuff used to be grown in Russia a lot, from what I heard because of lack of safety oversight there) makes a good crystal and shows something interesting going on.
I imagine these new higher temperature superconductors would yield enough increase in efficiency that using magnetic shielding has now become cost effect. To be honest i assume that power transmission companies by now are working as fast as they can (maybe still a snails pace but as fast as they can) to get these devices in the field. If now with this discovery very very very soon we will see superconductive power transmission.The reason why is that it would literally save billions of dollars.
...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.
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It's also a PITA to try and wind ceramic "wire" into a coil.
suggesting we should use these for power lines.
According to wikipedia However, superconductivity is sensitive to moving magnetic fields Which would be the purpose of the magnets at LHC...
Also since all electric current creates magnetism, the magnetism created by hundreds of amps would be much greater than the magnetism created by a few magnets. So I doubt any concern for the change caused by throwing in some small permanent magnets, unless they are being thrown around at high speeds as well. Concerns with how well any superconductor would work for power lines seams to be still in question though, hence the focus on other uses.
Man, Faraday's gonna beat you up, you talk smack like that...
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Except that superconducting power transmission lines are likely to be buried along with their cooling systems. There are a couple of places on Earth where overhead superconducting power lines might work year round, but there's really not much call for a power grid in Antarctica.
Actually not only is that a good idea, but Antarctica could definitely use some long haul power transmission lines.
While I don't think the usual 'grid' method would be worth while (at least financially) a ring or star where each major end point had at least 2 and possibly 3 legs out, for some basic redundancy.
The weather in Vostok for example, where there is a research compound for sure (It is the only one I personally keep tabs on, but for all I know there is more than one) and such places, and their slightly more remote sensor grids could benefit from such a power supply.
One of the colder days just this week is at -90 F (-68 C) with a -126 F (89 C) wind chill factor.
In the March-April months I've seen as low as -120 F (-84 C) with -160 F (-107 C) wind chills.
I'm not sure what the peak temperatures in the summer months are, but assuming the range isn't too wild, that could simplify the cooling systems needed just by taking advantage of the environment.
Of course the reverse is also true. A wide range of temperatures between highs and lows would most likely complicate the cooling systems to be able to maintain a steady cold environment for the super conducting material.
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.
When combined with the element Vey, it forms Exasperatium.
In nature, you see it most often in crystalline form sprinkled through kvetchite.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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
Quite the contrary. High temperature superconductors can withstand stronger magnetic fields than low temperature ones. The reason you still use liquid helium to cool them is that it allows even greater field strengths. Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
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.
I believe their magnets are insulated in much the same way as the superconductors in the NMR I do maintenance on at work. The superconducting magnets are submerged in liquid helium. The liquid helium vessel is surrounded by a vacuum vessel to act as a layer of insulation/isolation. After that the whole thing is surrounded by another vessel containing liquid nitrogen which again is vacuum insulated, followed by more conventional insulation.
The liquid nitrogen, being quite cheap, is sacrificial. We need to top ours up every week or two. It absorbs the majority of the heat that radiates in through the first vacuum vessel.
The helium only needs to be topped up every 6 months or so.
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.
Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
Almost correct. As far as I'm aware, nobody has successfully used a high-temperature superconductor in particle accelerator applications, regardless of cost or difficulty. SRF linacs require a superconductor that is smooth and malleable, which ceramics are characteristically not.
The performance of the low-temperature niobium-based accelerators currently in operation is constrained by the surface topography of the niobium accelerating cavity itself. Superconductors have no resistance, though they can exhibit inductance, which is particularly noticeable when a surface defect "absorbs" some of the accelerator's RF energy, and ultimately converts it into heat.
CERN shouldn't be feeling foolish. Remember that the LHC is essentially 10-year-old technology, given that these big projects take ages to design, plan, and construct. Portions of the project such as the computing grid were deliberately not designed/implemented until the main accelerator had mostly been built, as major advances were (correctly) predicted in these fields. This isn't CERN's fault, but rather a simple reflection of the nature of cutting-edge research.
It will likely be another 10 years before (if) we figure out a way to build a particle accelerator out of an "icebox-temperature" ceramic superconductor, and likely another 10 years before we see a workably-large accelerator constructed around the material. This is OK, because in the interim we'll be seeing projects built around discoveries from 9,8,7,6.... years ago.
Of course, if we stop funding basic research, this trend won't continue.
(I wrote a thesis on this subject. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose