Cost of LHC is $5B This one would be 3-4x as large. So I would assume $15B-20B.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider#Comparison_to_the_Large_Hadron_Collider), the LHC was only so cheap because it took over existing tunnels from the former Large Electron-Positron Collider (whose cost a cursory Google search does not reveal). Digging fresh tunnels will add much more expense to the project.
The Pilkington method, as claimed in patent 2,911,759, describes a method for producing and manufacturing glass. Based on the wording of that patent, it seems only to have ever been considered for, only describes, and, therefore, only applies to what is traditionally thought of as "glass" - the hard clear stuff made mostly of silica. As well, it seems quite narrowly focused on such silica glass, effectively limiting its applicability to other materials. The patent in question here, 8,485,245 B1, talks about a superficially similar method used to manufacture amorphous metallic alloys, also known variously as bulk metallic glasses, liquid metals, and glassy metals. Since it's a method on a completely different materials system, it would indeed be eligible for patent protection. The earlier Pilkington patent also doesn't cover anything regarding the various temperature-controlled annealing and phase transformation steps outlined in claim 1 of the Crucible patent, though that part would be pretty obvious and obviously necessary to anyone skilled in the art of amorphous metallurgy.
Just the front page was down, though. I was able to access various pages within, including product pages, but www.amazon.com itself was unavailable. Didn't try to buy anything, though.
I hate being a nay-sayer, but the NYT article is making quite a spectacle about this whole thing. What the group has truly done is demonstrate a novel method for placing a single phosphorus atom within silicon and proceeded to measure the semiconducting properties of the resultant device with quite good precision. Because the doping is the result of a single atom, they can resolve more than just "on" and "off", and in fact can read three states from it, so it gets its quantum computing title.
As a materials scientist, I'm worried that they don't show any long-term data and all their results appear (from my not-so-thorough reading of the originating Nature Nanotechnology report) to be based on a single device. How repeatable is this result and how consistent are the signals across multiple devices? How far will the phosphorus atom diffuse over the lifetime of the device? Or even over the first few hours of its operation at room temperature? How closely can these devices be placed to each other on the silicon chip without getting cross-interference or depriving the dopant of its discrete quantum states? The dopants in a normal device aren't too terribly close to each other. And finally, how big must the surrounding structure be?
Don't get me wrong, this is excellent science and well deserving of its publication in such a prestigious journal, but the spectacle that the NYT is creating around this and the dreams of such a tiny device is a bit premature.
The glass is a mere three atoms thick — the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional.
It's not two dimensional if it has a measurable thickness, which you stated in that same sentence. Unless you have a different definition of "two dimensional" than the rest of us.
Really? Graphene is 0.34 nm thick, and I'm quite certain that is a 2 dimensional material. In terms of graphene it's 3 dimensional after 3 layers. So the measurable thickness argument isn't valid
Graphene is most certainly not.34 nm thick. What you are quoting is the equilibrium spacing between one graphene sheet and the next in crystalline graphite. The true "thickness" of graphene is hard to gauge, actually. If you take the standard model of quantum mechanics, the carbon atoms within graphene are point particles, and therefore have no thickness. It is reasonable, then, to measure the extent of the electron clouds from the carbon. Since the electron clouds are statistical formulations, they theoretically extend to infinity. However, because I'm a materials scientist and not some fancy physicist with a deep, quantitative understanding of electron orbital theory, I would say a good guess is to say that the radius of the electron cloud around a particular atom is about equal to half the bond length between one carbon and the next. In this case, about 0.071 nm.
So if I were pressed to give an answer as to the thickness of a graphene sheet, not that it would generally matter in any context I'd think of, I'd call it 0.142 nm thick.
The glass is a mere three atoms thick — the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional.
It's not two dimensional if it has a measurable thickness, which you stated in that same sentence. Unless you have a different definition of "two dimensional" than the rest of us.
Your question can be answered in two ways. First, in the materials science community, it's common to denote a material or chunk of material that has a very high aspect ratio, for instance very large in one or two dimensions and small in size on the order of the atomic scale in the remaining directions as effectively one- and two-dimensional. In fact, quantum dots are thought of in materials science as generally zero-dimensional, even though they most certainly have more than one atom (and even if they comprised a single atom, the electron cloud extends in three dimensions). So, as far as the materials science and electron microscopy fields are concerned, this is two-dimensional.
Second, you tend to get your paper published in fancier journals and grab more headlines by having sensational things such as 2D (in this case) or quantum or some such buzzword in your title these days.
TEM Comments This experiment was actually quite a bit harder to carry out than you think. (I imagine, as I wasn't involved in this study but do similar work.) Doing these experiments is like traveling to the moon in that the principles are relatively simple, but it's the details that are hard. While operation of the TEM is relatively easy, preparation of samples is extremely tedious even when the sample is relatively robust and isotropic and it doesn't matter where you need to look on the sample. Constructing a TEM specimen with the intention of looking at a tiny little feature of some larger piece of material is extremely difficult, taking hours or days, if even possible. It's even more difficult to prepare a specimen and have the right equipment set up to control and observe dynamic processes, such as lithium discharge from a single nanofiber. And viewing dynamics in a complicated system, like a battery, which contains at a very minimum three active components, anode, cathode, and electrolyte, is another order of magnitude harder. Plus you have to find a way to make the thing less than 20 nanometers thick and get it into a microscope at high vacuum without breaking or contaminating it, which is nontrivial. There's also the cost of the equipment, which is between $500,000 and $10 million for the microscope itself and another couple hundred thousand dollars for the specialized probes required to do this experiment. I do this for a living myself, as do many people across the world who are either pursuing or already have PhDs in microscopy and analysis, and if it were easy, it'd've already been done and we'd be out of the job.
Battery comments We understand pretty much exactly why batteries wear out. Though the anodes in "real" batteries are usually some form of graphite, which expands less than 10% versus the SnOx in the video (~250%), there is still jostling of all the little powders that form the battery upon charging and discharging that eventually lead to the individual particles separating from the electrodes as a whole and essentially becoming dead micro-paperweights within the battery cell. It's just very hard to image them dynamically in a realistic operation because air and water vapor tend to destroy the materials nearly instantly.
This is some just really old news. Papers have been published on this and the other myriad sources of lithium battery degradation over the last several decades. In fact, this sort of coarsening, irreversibility, and poisoning are common in all such "nano" and even "micro" systems in which thermodynamics and kinetics are pitted against each other. For instance, at a three day international workshop on automotive lithium batteries half a decade ago, about a third of the talks were on various degradation mechanisms in these systems. On the other hand, this might be something completely knew that no one in the materials science or electrochemistry fields have heard of, but, being one of those people, and seeing the utter lack of detail in the news article and not being able to find the originating scientific publication, I doubt it. It looks like one of many articles on the subject that someone happened to pick up and submit.
And yes, I'm a materials scientist and I study nano-scale materials, including battery electrodes.
While this particular microscope may not have atomic resolution, transmission electron microscopy can indeed achieve atomic resolution. With recent advances in spherical aberration correction, TEMs can see sub-Angstrom (0.1 nm) resolution and scanning TEMs (STEMs) can image individual atoms outside of any ordered lattice. While these instruments are relatively new and, until recently, have been limited to places like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they are quickly being installed in several universities.
Actually, in the materials science and condensed matter physics community, the terms "metallic glass" and "amorphous metal" are one in the same and are used interchangeably. In fact, depending on the journal, a scientific paper usually starts out with the words "In this work, we study the [whatever property] of metallic glasses, or amorphous metals, under [whatever conditions]."
Amorphous materials are materials lacking any long-range order, or crystallinity. This property applies to things like most plastics (think polyethylene sandwich bags) and window glass. The term glass is simply a more lay term for amorphous, with some connotations to the fact that it is a kinetically jammed state and that the material is not at thermal equilibrium in this glassy state. However, as the relaxation times for most glasses are on the order of geologic or astronomical time - millions or billions of years - this effectively does not matter.
The terms "metal" and "metallic" are much simpler to relate, as one is simply the adjective form of the other. These terms both describe a material in which the atoms sit in a so-called "sea of electrons" and, more pertinently, will freely conduct electrons. Specifically, in a metal, the Fermi energy is in the center of an electron band, allowing for the conduction of electrons with very little excitation, whereas in an insulator (or semiconductor), the Fermi energy sits within forbidden energy levels, also known as the band gap.
Moving on to matters of a bit more relevancy, this is a bad summary of a wildly inaccurate news article based on a very complicated journal article that has very little relation to either. The original Nature Materials article in question simply talks about a very clever set of experiments in which the investigators, for the first time it seems, were able to view a certain type of local icosohedral ordering within the material during the onset of solidification, something that had been theorized to happen and has been well established in literature through computer modeling, but which is extremely difficult to see with even the most high-powered electron microscopes of today.
This work may have many implications in future research, but it is of little consequence to the amorphous metals used today in golf clubs or tomorrow in transparent aluminum (which won't happen for reasons listed in previous comments) and airplane wings (which is a very scary thought, because they are very heavy compared to aluminum or carbon fiber and fail catastrophically). The types of bulk metallic glasses used today rely on a different kinetic mechanism to these local energy minimum states to keep from crystallizing, in that the alloys are so complex and have so many different types of constituent elements that the atoms simply would take to long to migrate into any crystal lattice and just freeze in place.
IAAMS (I am a materials scientist) and yes, I've done experiments on amorphous metallic systems, albeit during undergrad research and via simulations.
Well, maybe this works at room temperature at The University of Saskatchewan, but down here in tropical Michigan, we still have significant work to do!
Not to get too technical here, but each blob is actually a column of atoms, as the specimen is wedge-shaped and certainly more than one atomic layer thick.
Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) has been combined with STEM imaging for several years at least, allowing similar sorts of images to be synthesized. The major contribution of this work is that they've modified the optics so that, even at 0.5 angstrom beam widths (and hence pixel sizes), they still get enough signal to the EELS detector to allow for EELS mapping and spectra acquisition for each of those pixels, giving direct bonding information about the particular portions of atoms probed by the beam. That means that the researchers can tell the difference between titanium atomic columns at different locations within the crystal, depending on the other atoms surrounding them.
Well, I suppose I did end up getting too technical.
IAATEL (I am a transmission electron microscopist)
Capacitors like this are usually referred to as electric double layer capacitors. These days, they are made mostly with ultra-high surface area activated carbon powders, but there is a lot of research into making the electrodes out of aligned carbon nanotubes. They are constructed in sort of a sandwich involving for each electrode a metal foil current collector (usually aluminum) onto which the active electrode material (either AC or CNTs) are deposited. The anode and the cathode sections are sandwiched with each other and seperated by a thin mesh layer to prevent electrical shorting. The two electrodes are then rolled up with each other and placed in a canister and the entire assembly is filled with a dielectric fluid. The double layer part of the name comes from the fact that the polar molecules in the dielectric fluid align along the entire surface of the porous electrode. Therefore, the active surface of the capacitor is not just the portions closest to the opposing electrode but the entirety of the surface which is in contact with the dielectric fluid. The presence of the fluid dielectric as opposed to a solid dielectric material usually placed in a parallel plate capacitor gives the engineer allowances in not having to painstakingly align all the surfaces to very high tolerances. Here are some websites with illustrations which are probably a lot more elucidating than my descriptions:
http://www.hohsen.co.jp/en/products/edlc/index4.ht mlhttp://ecnmag.com/article/CA202159.html
It's good to know that all the stuff I learned designing one of the damned devices for four months for my senior design course is finally proving useful.
Commerce Township is in Oakland County, so the distance may not be 14 miles. They may very well be in the same building. If I can recall correctly, I think I've actually seen the Z4 building before in the vicinity of Commerce Township (I come from those whereabouts, but am currently at school in Ann Arbor so I can't confirm).
In one of the Star Trek books by William Shatner (incidentally the only one I've ever read), I believe they discuss the very fact that Vger was modified and given life by the Borg, or some such thing. I think the book was called "The Return" or something. They discuss a lot more about it, but it was a number of years ago, and I can't really remember any of it anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
If ignorance is bliss, then a clam can be quite happy.
Well, the numbers are all there in the summary
Cost of LHC is $5B
This one would be 3-4x as large.
So I would assume $15B-20B.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider#Comparison_to_the_Large_Hadron_Collider), the LHC was only so cheap because it took over existing tunnels from the former Large Electron-Positron Collider (whose cost a cursory Google search does not reveal). Digging fresh tunnels will add much more expense to the project.
The Pilkington method, as claimed in patent 2,911,759, describes a method for producing and manufacturing glass. Based on the wording of that patent, it seems only to have ever been considered for, only describes, and, therefore, only applies to what is traditionally thought of as "glass" - the hard clear stuff made mostly of silica. As well, it seems quite narrowly focused on such silica glass, effectively limiting its applicability to other materials. The patent in question here, 8,485,245 B1, talks about a superficially similar method used to manufacture amorphous metallic alloys, also known variously as bulk metallic glasses, liquid metals, and glassy metals. Since it's a method on a completely different materials system, it would indeed be eligible for patent protection. The earlier Pilkington patent also doesn't cover anything regarding the various temperature-controlled annealing and phase transformation steps outlined in claim 1 of the Crucible patent, though that part would be pretty obvious and obviously necessary to anyone skilled in the art of amorphous metallurgy.
Just the front page was down, though. I was able to access various pages within, including product pages, but www.amazon.com itself was unavailable. Didn't try to buy anything, though.
I hate being a nay-sayer, but the NYT article is making quite a spectacle about this whole thing. What the group has truly done is demonstrate a novel method for placing a single phosphorus atom within silicon and proceeded to measure the semiconducting properties of the resultant device with quite good precision. Because the doping is the result of a single atom, they can resolve more than just "on" and "off", and in fact can read three states from it, so it gets its quantum computing title.
As a materials scientist, I'm worried that they don't show any long-term data and all their results appear (from my not-so-thorough reading of the originating Nature Nanotechnology report) to be based on a single device. How repeatable is this result and how consistent are the signals across multiple devices? How far will the phosphorus atom diffuse over the lifetime of the device? Or even over the first few hours of its operation at room temperature? How closely can these devices be placed to each other on the silicon chip without getting cross-interference or depriving the dopant of its discrete quantum states? The dopants in a normal device aren't too terribly close to each other. And finally, how big must the surrounding structure be?
Don't get me wrong, this is excellent science and well deserving of its publication in such a prestigious journal, but the spectacle that the NYT is creating around this and the dreams of such a tiny device is a bit premature.
The glass is a mere three atoms thick — the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional.
It's not two dimensional if it has a measurable thickness, which you stated in that same sentence. Unless you have a different definition of "two dimensional" than the rest of us.
Really? Graphene is 0.34 nm thick, and I'm quite certain that is a 2 dimensional material. In terms of graphene it's 3 dimensional after 3 layers. So the measurable thickness argument isn't valid
Graphene is most certainly not .34 nm thick. What you are quoting is the equilibrium spacing between one graphene sheet and the next in crystalline graphite. The true "thickness" of graphene is hard to gauge, actually. If you take the standard model of quantum mechanics, the carbon atoms within graphene are point particles, and therefore have no thickness. It is reasonable, then, to measure the extent of the electron clouds from the carbon. Since the electron clouds are statistical formulations, they theoretically extend to infinity. However, because I'm a materials scientist and not some fancy physicist with a deep, quantitative understanding of electron orbital theory, I would say a good guess is to say that the radius of the electron cloud around a particular atom is about equal to half the bond length between one carbon and the next. In this case, about 0.071 nm.
So if I were pressed to give an answer as to the thickness of a graphene sheet, not that it would generally matter in any context I'd think of, I'd call it 0.142 nm thick.
The glass is a mere three atoms thick — the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional.
It's not two dimensional if it has a measurable thickness, which you stated in that same sentence. Unless you have a different definition of "two dimensional" than the rest of us.
Your question can be answered in two ways. First, in the materials science community, it's common to denote a material or chunk of material that has a very high aspect ratio, for instance very large in one or two dimensions and small in size on the order of the atomic scale in the remaining directions as effectively one- and two-dimensional. In fact, quantum dots are thought of in materials science as generally zero-dimensional, even though they most certainly have more than one atom (and even if they comprised a single atom, the electron cloud extends in three dimensions). So, as far as the materials science and electron microscopy fields are concerned, this is two-dimensional.
Second, you tend to get your paper published in fancier journals and grab more headlines by having sensational things such as 2D (in this case) or quantum or some such buzzword in your title these days.
The more I read about this story, the more I think "This sounds an awful lot like grad school."
TEM Comments
This experiment was actually quite a bit harder to carry out than you think. (I imagine, as I wasn't involved in this study but do similar work.) Doing these experiments is like traveling to the moon in that the principles are relatively simple, but it's the details that are hard. While operation of the TEM is relatively easy, preparation of samples is extremely tedious even when the sample is relatively robust and isotropic and it doesn't matter where you need to look on the sample. Constructing a TEM specimen with the intention of looking at a tiny little feature of some larger piece of material is extremely difficult, taking hours or days, if even possible. It's even more difficult to prepare a specimen and have the right equipment set up to control and observe dynamic processes, such as lithium discharge from a single nanofiber. And viewing dynamics in a complicated system, like a battery, which contains at a very minimum three active components, anode, cathode, and electrolyte, is another order of magnitude harder. Plus you have to find a way to make the thing less than 20 nanometers thick and get it into a microscope at high vacuum without breaking or contaminating it, which is nontrivial. There's also the cost of the equipment, which is between $500,000 and $10 million for the microscope itself and another couple hundred thousand dollars for the specialized probes required to do this experiment. I do this for a living myself, as do many people across the world who are either pursuing or already have PhDs in microscopy and analysis, and if it were easy, it'd've already been done and we'd be out of the job.
Battery comments
We understand pretty much exactly why batteries wear out. Though the anodes in "real" batteries are usually some form of graphite, which expands less than 10% versus the SnOx in the video (~250%), there is still jostling of all the little powders that form the battery upon charging and discharging that eventually lead to the individual particles separating from the electrodes as a whole and essentially becoming dead micro-paperweights within the battery cell. It's just very hard to image them dynamically in a realistic operation because air and water vapor tend to destroy the materials nearly instantly.
This is some just really old news. Papers have been published on this and the other myriad sources of lithium battery degradation over the last several decades. In fact, this sort of coarsening, irreversibility, and poisoning are common in all such "nano" and even "micro" systems in which thermodynamics and kinetics are pitted against each other. For instance, at a three day international workshop on automotive lithium batteries half a decade ago, about a third of the talks were on various degradation mechanisms in these systems. On the other hand, this might be something completely knew that no one in the materials science or electrochemistry fields have heard of, but, being one of those people, and seeing the utter lack of detail in the news article and not being able to find the originating scientific publication, I doubt it. It looks like one of many articles on the subject that someone happened to pick up and submit. And yes, I'm a materials scientist and I study nano-scale materials, including battery electrodes.
While this particular microscope may not have atomic resolution, transmission electron microscopy can indeed achieve atomic resolution. With recent advances in spherical aberration correction, TEMs can see sub-Angstrom (0.1 nm) resolution and scanning TEMs (STEMs) can image individual atoms outside of any ordered lattice. While these instruments are relatively new and, until recently, have been limited to places like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they are quickly being installed in several universities.
Amorphous materials are materials lacking any long-range order, or crystallinity. This property applies to things like most plastics (think polyethylene sandwich bags) and window glass. The term glass is simply a more lay term for amorphous, with some connotations to the fact that it is a kinetically jammed state and that the material is not at thermal equilibrium in this glassy state. However, as the relaxation times for most glasses are on the order of geologic or astronomical time - millions or billions of years - this effectively does not matter.
The terms "metal" and "metallic" are much simpler to relate, as one is simply the adjective form of the other. These terms both describe a material in which the atoms sit in a so-called "sea of electrons" and, more pertinently, will freely conduct electrons. Specifically, in a metal, the Fermi energy is in the center of an electron band, allowing for the conduction of electrons with very little excitation, whereas in an insulator (or semiconductor), the Fermi energy sits within forbidden energy levels, also known as the band gap.
Moving on to matters of a bit more relevancy, this is a bad summary of a wildly inaccurate news article based on a very complicated journal article that has very little relation to either. The original Nature Materials article in question simply talks about a very clever set of experiments in which the investigators, for the first time it seems, were able to view a certain type of local icosohedral ordering within the material during the onset of solidification, something that had been theorized to happen and has been well established in literature through computer modeling, but which is extremely difficult to see with even the most high-powered electron microscopes of today.
This work may have many implications in future research, but it is of little consequence to the amorphous metals used today in golf clubs or tomorrow in transparent aluminum (which won't happen for reasons listed in previous comments) and airplane wings (which is a very scary thought, because they are very heavy compared to aluminum or carbon fiber and fail catastrophically). The types of bulk metallic glasses used today rely on a different kinetic mechanism to these local energy minimum states to keep from crystallizing, in that the alloys are so complex and have so many different types of constituent elements that the atoms simply would take to long to migrate into any crystal lattice and just freeze in place.
IAAMS (I am a materials scientist) and yes, I've done experiments on amorphous metallic systems, albeit during undergrad research and via simulations.
Well, maybe this works at room temperature at The University of Saskatchewan, but down here in tropical Michigan, we still have significant work to do!
Microscopy's what I do. I never said I was good at acronymization.
Though looking back at it, I feel really dumb because I don't know how I made such a blatant error, what with being capitalized and all!
Not to get too technical here, but each blob is actually a column of atoms, as the specimen is wedge-shaped and certainly more than one atomic layer thick.
Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) has been combined with STEM imaging for several years at least, allowing similar sorts of images to be synthesized. The major contribution of this work is that they've modified the optics so that, even at 0.5 angstrom beam widths (and hence pixel sizes), they still get enough signal to the EELS detector to allow for EELS mapping and spectra acquisition for each of those pixels, giving direct bonding information about the particular portions of atoms probed by the beam. That means that the researchers can tell the difference between titanium atomic columns at different locations within the crystal, depending on the other atoms surrounding them.
Well, I suppose I did end up getting too technical.
IAATEL (I am a transmission electron microscopist)
Capacitors like this are usually referred to as electric double layer capacitors. These days, they are made mostly with ultra-high surface area activated carbon powders, but there is a lot of research into making the electrodes out of aligned carbon nanotubes. They are constructed in sort of a sandwich involving for each electrode a metal foil current collector (usually aluminum) onto which the active electrode material (either AC or CNTs) are deposited. The anode and the cathode sections are sandwiched with each other and seperated by a thin mesh layer to prevent electrical shorting. The two electrodes are then rolled up with each other and placed in a canister and the entire assembly is filled with a dielectric fluid. The double layer part of the name comes from the fact that the polar molecules in the dielectric fluid align along the entire surface of the porous electrode. Therefore, the active surface of the capacitor is not just the portions closest to the opposing electrode but the entirety of the surface which is in contact with the dielectric fluid. The presence of the fluid dielectric as opposed to a solid dielectric material usually placed in a parallel plate capacitor gives the engineer allowances in not having to painstakingly align all the surfaces to very high tolerances. Here are some websites with illustrations which are probably a lot more elucidating than my descriptions: http://www.hohsen.co.jp/en/products/edlc/index4.ht ml
http://ecnmag.com/article/CA202159.html
It's good to know that all the stuff I learned designing one of the damned devices for four months for my senior design course is finally proving useful.
Commerce Township is in Oakland County, so the distance may not be 14 miles. They may very well be in the same building. If I can recall correctly, I think I've actually seen the Z4 building before in the vicinity of Commerce Township (I come from those whereabouts, but am currently at school in Ann Arbor so I can't confirm).
In one of the Star Trek books by William Shatner (incidentally the only one I've ever read), I believe they discuss the very fact that Vger was modified and given life by the Borg, or some such thing. I think the book was called "The Return" or something. They discuss a lot more about it, but it was a number of years ago, and I can't really remember any of it anymore.