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."
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Room Temperature!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:3, Informative)
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. Cooling something with liquid helium is insanely difficult and expensive.
If a device requires liquid Helium, you can be assured that its operators have extremely deep pockets, and are funding research to eliminate or reduce the need for liquid Helium cryogenics. To say the least, maintaining a device at 2 Kelvin is rather costly.
If the LHC could run at room temperature, it'd cost a mere fraction of what it does.
Re:Room Temperature!! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Space - application with today's Superconductor (Score:2, Informative)
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 need to worry about this much, though, when studying basic thermodynamics.) Photonic energy is generated by any hot (meaning above absolute zero, which everything in the universe necessarily must be, by definition) bodies in a radiative process and absorbed by adjoining bodies.
This is why most people think IR is heat; however, is the orange glow of a flame heat, or is it the radiative light given off by the combusting fuel and air/oxidizer?
Radiated IR is not heat. It is the body radiation of matter that is undergoing the motive process of being in any hot state. Collisions among molecules, ions, and bonded and unbonded atoms are not perfectly elastic; sometimes one of the particles will be pushed to a higher energy state, and this is energy is subsequently radiated as a photon.
Kinetic energy (classically m*v^2/2) and photonic energy (h*nu) are both forms of energy.
(Posting anon because I know a physics expert is going to come in and nitpick and make me look... like a retard *grin*)