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The Record For High-Temperature Superconductivity Has Been Smashed Again (technologyreview.com)
Chemists have found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
I want to read more...
After all, generating that kind of pressure in your computer should be easy.
The pressure might be high, but it doesn't require constantly putting energy into it. So I wouldn't call it much of a caveat. It still nearly solves exactly what we needed.
-23C can be done with a better freezer. Make it really bulky, preferably out of an isolating material, and your energy usage will be small enough to run it on a local wind turbine or solar panel.
It's enough, IMHO, to make consumer superconducting electronics a thing. Certainly, a superconducting CPU for the average user is now thinkable.
What I want to know, is at what point it takes less energy to cool it, than it takes to not have superconductivity. It seems to me, as a layman, that we've already passed that point.
We don't need literally room temperature superconductors in order to have a lot of the benefits that people associate with room temperature superconductors. -23 C is within essentially close to the range of conventional refrigeration equipment. Once one doesn't need to rely on liquid nitrogen cooling for superconductors, the general use goes way up. The pressure is of course a pretty big issue, but if for example one had something that was a superconductor at -30 C and 2 gigapascals that would be incredibly practically useful.
And it is worth keeping in mind that even superconductors which require very cold temperatures are now being produced and used in large enough quantities that we can use them as part of the regular electric grid. The US Eastern electric grid already has a superconducting cable in Long Island https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/long-island-hts-power-cable and the Tres Amigas Superstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation is going to have superconducting lines to allow efficient transfer between the three major US grids (East, West and Texas). This sort of thing will also help renewable energy a lot; since right now, there's often more wind or solar power somewhere than one directly needs but hard to get it elsewhere, and then not enough wind or solar at some other time. More efficient grids mean that excess can be much more easily transferred to where it can be used.
170 gPascals ~= 1.68 Million atmospheres.
I just did a quick Google search on "High Pressure Operations" and couldn't find anything that was within two or three orders of magnitude of this level of pressure. To make artificial diamonds, you need around 8.4gPascals. Maybe somebody with experience with high pressure operations can provide references to other operations at this pressure level.
TFA references "USOs" (Unidentified Superconducting Objects" and I would argue that this is one of them.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
..."Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
This kind of reminds me of when I hear about new and exciting discoveries regarding habitable planets that are "only" a few light-years away. (The caveat being we have no way of traveling at 186,000 miles per second or faster to get there.)
I think I found a way to get the required pressure easily. The density displayed in some postings here should be sufficient to create the pressure by mere gravitational force.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Did they try using 1.7 gigaasm instead?
#DeleteFacebook
This proofs it. Science is wonderfull.
She's under so much pressure maybe she'll become superconducting?
Can we count on using the current temperature of the North Pole as the temperature we can conduct superconductivity? If so, climate change will be a huge help for progress in this field. /s
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It's easy, you just need 1.21 jiggawatts!
So in terms of usefulness, this is the least useful semiconductor yet, since it is far easier to super cool a semiconductor than apply ludicrous amounts of pressure.
Better known as 318230.
"The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, "
Sure sounds like an example of the Principle of Conservation of Difficulty:
difficulty is neither created nor destroyed, only changed in form.
I thought this was going to be another story about climate change.
Yeah, I'm kind of cynical.
Don't you people know what you're doing? The world is overheating and you're making it worse with high temperature semiconductors. You should be using low temperature semiconductors.
How does it compare the the current temperature in the library of congress?
Blue Tooth?
The device used to get to this type of pressure is called a diamond anvil press/cell (see wikipedia) And no, there is no way to use such a device outside a very specialized lab.
-23C and 20C are miles apart. They are not remotely close. I wish Slashdot would stop with the sensationalist hyperbole.
This is like saying a bicycle racer who can go 50km/h wide open and on every steroid known to man, is tantalizingly close to going 200km/h, if he'd just try a teensy bit harder.
People who understand physics and energy see the absurdity and this kind of statement.
In order to transport this kind of pressure through a SS Pipe (hoop stress of around 62ksi) You could use a pipe with the ID of a human hair, and .275" OD
The pressure to achieve this would be simple. You would just need to balance about 1250 lbs (about the weight of a horse) on that single hair. You can balance a horse on a hair, standing straight up, right?
So far as I can tell from the source, this material is not in a stable state, meaning release the pressure and the structure falls apart. However, that is not the case with all solid structures. For example, it takes a lot of pressure to form a diamond crystal out of carbon, but once you have this "seed" crystal, there are chemical techniques for growing the crystal under much less demandin thermodynamics.
(also true for Ice-9, but only in fiction, sadly).
Thus -- one of these days maybe this kind of research will produce a structure that is both superconducting and stable after the initial formation of the (presumably crystalline) material.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole. "Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
That's not a caveat. That's a show stopping problem. In what circumstances would this finding be useful given the ridiculous pressure involved? I get that it's probably a new line of discovery and that eventually it could result in something practical but as it stands this definitely isn't practical.
What we want is superconductivity at temperatures and pressures that require minimal to (preferably) no refrigeration at temperature ranges habitable to humans and no special pressure vessels under routine circumstances.
This is 2018, they would use gigapythons instead.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
When you're dealing with extreme pressures the temperature becomes less of a focal point in terms of advances in practicality. Ofsetting one engineering challenge for another that is equally difficult (but for different reasons) is not really a massive leap towards room temperature superconductivity. It's a step towards a different way of achieving superconductivity that is still going to be really difficult to implement well, and will take extreme skill to achieve.
Hats off to the researchers and engineers. Sincerely. A massive flipped bird to the way these things get reported. "Tantalizingly close"? Piss off. That whole outlook unfairly raises expecations while simultaneously reducing the scope of credit deserved for progress so far by oversimplifying a tremendously complicated problem.
For future generations, this was posed in 2018. At that point, the North Pole was still considered really cold.
Fun race, which progresses faster, room-temp. superconductors or temp. at the North Pole. Looking forward to the new headline in 3 years - "North Pole warms up, no longer able to cool superconductors anymore."
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Challenge accepted. I think trump got a head start on this one. The North Pole will be warmer soon, just you wait and see.
1 - Terrestrial North Pole
2 - Magnetic North Pole
3 - Geomagnetic North Pole
4 - North Pole, Alaska
Came here excited by the headline, then read the comments and saw the real story. So let's play the headline game! That's where you make up an impressive headline, then try to find a mundane way that the headline could be true without anything special happening.
Headline: "Scientist creates smallest bacteria ever"
Reality: Someone CG rendered a bacteria that is smaller than any known bacteria.
Headline: "Russia creates most powerful atomic bomb ever."
Reality: Strapped 2 atomic bombs together with duct tape.
Headline: "Farmer discovered with IQ higher than Einstein"
Reality: Historical documents reveal a guy born in the year 1427 who performed amazing mental feats, possibly smarter than anyone alive today.
Headline: "NASA confirms bacterial life on the moon"
Reality: It's the bag of poop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind.
Headline: "New spacecraft is so fast it could carry a human to interstellar space in only a few months."
Reality: It's a cubesat with a solar sail attached, but no room for any payload.
There isn't enough RAM in the universe for even 1 megapython.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Your post is fairly ridiculous. It's right there in the goddamned summary. How did they leave it out? How are you even able to bitch about something that is missing if you didn't know it was missing? IT'S NOT FUCKING MISSING!
http://www.superconductors.org/216C209C.htm. This stuff doesn't even have to be under pressure. Alas, it's neither stable nor macroscopic.
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Blue Tooth?
Great idea. RF should easily penetrate a thick metal pressure vessel, and power over Bluetooth is proven technology.
"That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole." Just in time for Santa Claus's workshop. Apart from the pressure...