New Type of Superconductivity Spotted 71
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from a story about research into an unusual form of superconductivity:"Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field — or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. The advance may not immediately lead to new gadgets and applications, but it suggests that superconductivity, which has already netted four Nobel Prizes, may be an even richer phenomenon than previously thought."
Room Temperature!! (Score:1)
Re:Room Temperature!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Room Temperature!! (Score:5, Informative)
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Temperature is the wrong problem to focus on. Liquid nitrogen is relatively inexpensive & easily handled.
That's relative to liquid hydrogen I guess. For other applications you'd want to use superconductors though, no, it's really not. For instance, I'm not any kind of engineer, but it seems like superconducting long distance high-voltage power lines would be one thing that would be nice, and cooling miles of wire with liquid nitrogen seems like a big hassle.
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Thanks for sharing that. One of the sexiest hard engineering stories I've ever read.
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If your application requires charging up and down electromagnets regularly, that boils helium regardless of how good your insulation is. You'd much rather be boiling nitrogen.
While they're currently expensive there are a lot of applications that just use a small amount of material (and low current and low field, which can be a downside at high Tc). For example, SQUIDs [wikipedia.org] that can be cooled with LN2 instead of helium cost way less to operate and are just as good.
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Space - application with today's Superconductors (Score:5, Interesting)
A room-temperature superconductor would be nice, but even with today's superconductors a hell of a lot can be done...in space!
With all this talk of inter-planetary space travel, space provides the right temperature without expensive cooling systems. Simply insulate the superconductors from direct sunlight and you get great applications like passive superconductor magnetic bearings and other cool oddities that you would only get with expensive cooling systems here on earth.
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:3, Interesting)
Space isn't really cold... And any heat built up would need to be radiated away, not removed through conduction or convection. I'm not very well versed in this all, but I expect these limitations would actually make it hard to do all that much with...
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and to think, i could get modded insightful sometimes if i bothered to use proper sentence structure...
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While true, this is not "easy" -- radiative cooling is very restrictive, and you get no conductive or convective cooling in space.
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:5, Funny)
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Heat buildup from what, electrical resistance?
Oh snap!
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:5, Funny)
It's sometimes hard to see it from Earth, but it turns out there is a really large glowing ball out there sending heat in a directions.
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I wonder where all the excess flux goes?
Into the capacitor, duh.
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Actually, that large glowing ball is sending light in all directions. When said light strikes mass, the mass is energized and heat is produced. Heat doesn't travel through a vacuum.
Once in place and insulated from sunlight and physical contact from the insulator (along with anything else that might generate heat), maintaining a material at superconductivity should be no problem. The hard part is getting it to superconductivity in the first place. I think you'd have to send it out into space already at super
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:5, Informative)
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Er...and the medium they are in. I would lose body heat faster in the sea than in space, because of the volume of colder material and it's shape-conforming nature.
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Heat doesn't travel through a vacuum.
Er... what? Heat can pass through a vacuum perfectly well as electromagnetic radiation. I was warmed from the sun today.
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Common sense: FAIL
The two sides (in and out) of your can are only at a few hundred Kelvin, and the rate of IR leaving one side for the other is very low (and being only a few Kelvin apart, the net rate is going to be even lower). The sun, however, is at a few million Kelvin, and thus sends out IR at a much higher rate.
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Common sense: FAIL
The two sides (in and out) of your can are only at a few hundred Kelvin, and the rate of IR leaving one side for the other is very low (and being only a few Kelvin apart, the net rate is going to be even lower). The sun, however, is at a few million Kelvin, and thus sends out IR at a much higher rate.
Perhaps you're thinking of the inner core where fusion takes place. The surface, which is what radiates heat, light and other things to Earth, is not nearly as hot. One online figure is 5777k:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun [wikipedia.org]
The rest of your point is still valid, radiation isn't nearly as effective at moving heat as are conduction and convection, and that's why a Thermos bottle works.
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Actually, he's just being pedantic.
Thermodynamically, heat is a property of a body with mass (I'm ignoring quantum fluctuations here, and averaging over time), measured as the average vibrational energy with respect to the degrees of freedom of a body's constituent matter. (As we approach absolute zero, the wavelike aspects of matter makes this less sensical; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a property of waves, means that position becomes very indeterminable as momentum becomes well-defined. We don't
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What are you doing here on /. , traitor?
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Heat doesn't travel through a vacuum.
Oh, so THAT's the reason the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and visible light is always blacked out and ignored. Infrared is the polywater of the EM spectrum...
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Don't you just love it when a bunch of pedantic nerds get hold of a subject like this? They all try to shoot each other down by finding ever smaller, ever more pathetic flaws in their predecessor's argument, when the truth is most of them have no more than a passing knowledge, probably gleaned from the Discovery Channel.
It's like the "5 scifi geeks clustered round a broken laptop" syndrome. None of them actually knows how to fix it, but they're damn well going to try, and tell everyone else how stupid the
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Slashdot might be called news for nerds but I can assure you that there are a host of non-nerd types haunting the forum, government agents, government propagandists, marketdroids, intellectually handicapped failed jock straps all filling the forum with all sorts of rants, makes it more interesting.
Generally speaking an exchange of ideas is what /. is all about, so when you exchange, you are in fact exchanging correct ideas for faulty ideas, so obviously some posts will be wrong and upon correction people
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It would still have to be insulated from sunlight: almost any material would absorb more radiation from the sun than it would emit through radiation at ~3K, and thermal equilibrium would almost certainly happen at a much higher temperature than would allow for superconductivity.
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Even at that, you can ignore space or room-temperature superconductors.
Right now, there are a considerable number of devices that require superconductors at liquid nitrogen or liquid helium (~2 K) temperatures. You won't find them in your home, but you will find them everywhere at the cutting-edge of scientific research (medical imaging, particle accelerators, etc.)
The prospect of being able to make these devices cheaper, smaller, or more powerful is extremely enticing to the operators of these devices. C
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If the LHC could run at room temperature, it'd cost a mere fraction of what it does.
And it would've been done 3 years ago, since you don't have to warm-up and cool-down to fix every damn little problem, or train (heat/cool cycle) the magnets to get to the desired field strength.
Anyone seen Primer? (Score:1)
Wasn't that what the engineers in the movie Primer [primermovie.com] (trailer [youtube.com]) were working on?
Sorry, I just watched that for the first time earlier this week and am still enamored with it.
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It may have involved superconductors, but I think they were trying to do something with gravity at first. Hence measuring the change in weight of the object in the box, before they found the box's other properties.
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It may have involved superconductors, but I think they were trying to do something with gravity at first. Hence measuring the change in weight of the object in the box, before they found the box's other properties.
I hope people aren't modding your post interesting thinking you were talking about TFA rather than the movie I mentioned.
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Back off topic, I saw Primer in early 2008 and was very impressed. I just saw it tonight for the third time. $7,000 budget and better than the majority of multimillion-dollar movies.
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If you like primer, you'd like the movie pi, prolly. I liked both for about the same reasons.
Ben
Re:If scientists can be wrong about superconductor (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out God created bisexual superconductivity. :-)
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I shall answer this by invoking the usual "fixed it for ya" slashdot mantra, thus:
"I, for one, don't need to wonder how the hardcore Christians will react when they find out the devil created bisexual superconductivity in a vain attempt to tempt them away from the lord."
Missing tag: (Score:1)
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Actually, one of the tags currently on the story as of this writing, "dualactionscience" is both brilliant and humorous at the same time--and unlikely to offend anyone. I think it's appropriate. In fact, I'm still laughing about it nearly ten minutes later! Bravo to the individual who thought that one up.
So then... (Score:1, Interesting)
they're biconductors?
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Surely they're super hermaphroductors?
*shudder*
Ah! (Score:1)
why we need room temp (Score:2)
superconductors is for CPU/GPU chips. If we can finally get a material that's easy to work with, we'd finally be able to get damn CPU speeds in excess of 10GHz, which is what the P4 (netburst) architecture was designed to do.
The question then becomes, what do we do with such high speed chips? and the answers include Voice Recognition, Speech Synthesys, better pron (ray traced) and maybe Duke Nukem forever. Of course I can safely state that Windows 9 would certainly need such a CPU along with Symantec (NAV)
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Expert View (sort of) (Score:1)