Metamaterial Superconductor Hints At New Era of High Temperature Superconductors

KentuckyFC writes: Superconductors allow current to flow with zero resistance when cooled below some critical temperature. They are the crucial ingredients in everything from high-power magnets and MRI machines to highly sensitive magnetometers and magnetic levitation devices. But one big problem is that superconductors work only at very low temperatures — the highest is around 150 kelvin (-120 degrees centigrade). So scientists would dearly love to find ways of raising this critical temperature. Now a group of physicists say they've found a promising approach: to build metamaterial superconductors that steer electrons in the same way as other metamaterials steer light to create invisibility cloaks. The inspiration for the work comes from the observation that some high temperature superconductors consist of repeated layers of conducting and dielectric structures. So the team mixed tin — a superconductor at 3.7 kelvin — with the dielectric barium titanate and found that it raised the critical temperature by 0.15 kelvin. That's the first demonstration that superconductors can be thought of as metamaterials. With this proof of principle under their belts, the next step is to look for bigger gains at higher temperatures.

Comments

150 kelvin = -189.67 F

[Flavianoep]

You're welcome.

Re:150 kelvin = -189.67 F

[mark-t]

It's especially ironic because in Britain, they actually use the metric system.

Re:150 kelvin = -189.67 F

[meerling]

I'm in the USA, and when I was in grade school back in the early 70s (!) they only taught us the Metric system. To bad I was forced to halfway learn that piece of crap Imperial system because almost nobody else in the country would use it. For some reason they seem to think 16 sixteens to an inch, 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to the yard, 1760 yards in a mile is easier than a system where everything is based on 10. (I had to look up the feet/yards to mile, and so do most people, even the ones that don't know metrics.)

If you ask me, 10 millimeters to a centimeter, 10 centimeters to a decimeter, 10 decimeter to a meter, 10 meters to a decameter, 10 decameters to a hectometer, and 10 hectometers to a kilometer, and so on is just bloody easy.

If you want to convert millimeters to kilometers, it's dead simple as it's just operations of 10, which you might be more familiar with as moving the decimal point depending on your math classes. And by the way, that is 1,000,000 millimeters is one kilometer, no calculator needed for such a simple conversion.

Now for your next trick, try converting 16ths of an inch to a mile. I'm not sadistic, you can use a calculator, and good luck. :P

Re:0.15 degree from a 3.7 kelvin... that's "cool"

[JoshuaZ]

This is extremely preliminary. It is likely that later work will be able to increase it further. And even an increase in a few degrees centigrade would have practical impacts. Moreover, the ability to make metamaterials of this sort may lead to superconductors with different ranges wherein they engage in magnetic quenching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_quench which is important for safe and practical use of superconductors even today. It isn't uncommon for a bad quenching event to damage a particle accelerator. A particular bad example happened to the LHC back in 2008 dealing serious damage to the accelerator http://astroengine.com/2008/10/18/lhc-quench-ripped-magnets-from-concrete-floor/. Yes, this isn't immediately practical but it looks like there's a lot of potential.

I never ...

[CaptainDork]

... metamaterial I didn't like and stuff.