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.)

Comments

Well that solved the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, generating that kind of pressure in your computer should be easy.

Re:Well that solved the problem

[asylumx]

I think it's roughly same amount of pressure I feel in my head when my computer is running too slow...

Re:Well that solved the problem

[michelcolman]

Well, I can totally see Google, Amazon or Facebook creating a new data center in the center of the earth and drilling a hole down from the North Pole for a cooling line.

Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[tsqr]

While I agree that this is a big step forward, 25,000 psi is more than "not much of a caveat". Your PC is going to gain a lot of weight when you add a pressure vessel capable of containing that safely. Then there's the additional challenge of getting wires from inside to outside without compromising the vessel. I'd like to see the hermetic connectors they use for that.

Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[careysub]

This is 170 gigapascals. That is 1.7 million atmospheres! The most powerful high explosives known only produce pressures up to about 300,000 atmospheres. This can only done in a diamond anvil which have working sizes one the order of 100 microns (barely visible speck, without magnification).

No, this is not thinkable. There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge that allows to design some other material that can do the same trick without 6 times the detonation pressure of HMX.

Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[GameboyRMH]

I think you missed a few zeroes there, 170 gigapascals is around 25 million psi.

Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[es330td]

There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge

This, in general, is how scientific progress works. This is a proof of concept. Now that one person has done this others will be inspired in ways not previously anticipated to look at other avenues.

Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[Gavagai80]

A sufficiently resilient material to hold that kind of pressure on a macro-sized object would probably end up looking a lot like a planet. Perhaps we can enhance some of Jupiter's surplus moons to achieve the requirements and bring those into earth orbit to play around with.

Re: Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly.

[c6gunner]

Maybe, maybe not. Yeah sometimes discovering completely impractical things opens up new lines of research which do turn out to be groundbreaking. Other times it goes nowhere.

We already knew that pressure could change the conductivity of various materials, and we already knew it was possible to superconducting at relatively high temperatures. Ergo this discovery seems more likely to fall into the "goes nowhere" camp.

The long-term implications

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:The long-term implications

[dunkelfalke]

Yep, a liquid nitrogen cooled superconductor has been used in a German city as a part of the local power grid for several years now.

Re:The long-term implications

[JoshuaZ]

Do you have some citations to back that up? It wouldn't be terribly surprising to me if HDVC is better than a modern superconducting cable, but it isn't obvious to me. Once one has something that is well-insulated down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, the energy cost of keeping it there is extremely low.

Re:The long-term implications

[JoshuaZ]

That requires very large scale and highly efficient batteries. We might move there in the long-run but it in the short and medium run, having grid transfers makes sense. Batteries let you displace supply through time, and efficient grids let you displace supply through space. Both are useful.

Re:The long-term implications

[rpresser]

We *do* need superconductors. MRIs are an essential part of modern medicine.

What we don't need is long distance power transmission by superconductor.

This thread has been taken over by the unrealistic, unnecessary dream of superconducting power transmission. But there are a large number of other applications that superconductors enable. And doubtless even more that haven't been invented yet.

Re:The long-term implications

[Areyoukiddingme]

You wrote "The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. " I apparently misread that as being a claim about energy use. My apologies.

You have nothing to apologize for. Luckyo was drooling his ignorance all over you while making an ass of himself. The Long Island superconducting cable operates at 130 kV AC and has 150 times the power capacity of the same size conventional copper conductor, which means the right of way required to run it safely is much much narrower. They're moving 574 MW through a right of way just 4 feet wide. In New York City, that's incredibly valuable because the real estate required to operate a conventional line would be dramatically more expensive. Prohibitively more expensive, in fact. To operate a conventional cable, the voltage required to carry the same amount of power is much higher, which requires a correspondingly wider right of way for safety.

The Department of Energy helped pay for it. It went live in 2008 and the Long Island Power Authority has decided to keep it permanently, even though it was intended as a demonstrator. It's still in operation today. That tells you that it's cost effective to operate. LIPA will eventually install more such lines on the island in other locations that physically can't be replaced with a conventional HVDC line of the same capacity. There isn't room for one.

Ultimately, superconducting power cables will be HVDC installations themselves. Experiments out of Japan in 2010 demonstrated that HVDC over superconductors is 10 times more efficient than HVAC over the same size lines. There are still losses in superconductors. They're very very small compared to conventional lines, but they're non-zero.

Re:Where's the source link?

[BringsApples]

https://www.technologyreview.c...

That's a pretty big caveat

[mykepredko]

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.

Re:That's a pretty big caveat

[ganv]

They are using a diamond anvil cell. These regularly achieve hundreds of GPa (gigapascals). Wikipedia says the current record is 770 GPa. No one is going to be using these superconductors at the temperatures and pressures quoted for practical applications any time soon. At the surface of the earth we can only create these pressures in tiny volumes (these samples are 5 to 10 microns on a side). But our growing understanding of superconductivity will open avenues to optimize and use superconducting materials in more practical applications. The fact that computational models predicted high temperature superconductivity that was later observed in this material is a big advance. Early discoveries of HTC materials were purely empirical. It is also exciting that the same models predict even higher transition temperatures in Yttrium superhydrides. It is the understanding of superconductivity that will eventually create technological advances, not likely the specific high pressure superconductors studied here.

Re:Fake News

[Opportunist]

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.

Usefulness

[Dan East]

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.

The device is...

[Wdi]

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.

Re:Defining progress.

[jwhyche]

Yeah, its pretty useless outside of the lab. That seems to be the state of a lot of new advances today. "Hey we got a battery that will keep your phone running for 3 years on one charge. It only has to be made of a combination gold and element-295. Also to work it must be used while its stored up a rabid gorillas ass."