High-Temperature Superconductors

Anonymous Coward writes "Seems all those scientists who've spent years tweaking exotic materials at freakily low temperatures to turn them into superconductors should've just looked on the lab shelf. Magnesium diboride superconducts at much higher temperatures than other metallics and could even bust the theoretical max T, says this story at New Scientist. There's more research on the same here but 40K's still pretty cold - when's my laptop gonna run for free?"

Better computers

[milgram]

I guess that is why it is here.

Re:Better computers

[shuffler]

More efficient electric power distribution would be a benefit as well.

When's my laptop gonna run for free?

[bcrowell]

There's something that makes me feel just a little uncomfortable, somehow, about having a box in my lap full of liquids at cryogenic temperatures.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews

Warm enough for modern overclockers

[azephrahel]

Hey, if it can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, isn't it warm enough for today's nut-case overclockers? Huge fans arn't enough for these guys, nor water pumps. Hell they sell off the shelf cpu refrigerators now days (sharky's and hardocp have articles on them). So whats the extream overclocker gonna do? Liquid N2 chill their processors....there really are people willing to do that I'm sure. ;)

Re:Warm enough for modern overclockers

[Tomage]

http://www.octools.com/ If I'm not mistaken, these guys have put together two liquid nitrogen-cooled rigs in the last several months.

Re:That's cold

[Account Number Three]

Yes, but all the nitrogen-coolables are ceramics; this is the highest-temp metallic.

Superconducting power transmission.

[Christopher Thomas]

Unless you spend more energy cooling the thing than you save in lower transmission loss. I guess we need perfect insulators too.

Firstly, we have several insulation schemes that will work well enough for this purpose. Least exotic: Put a vacuum gap between your cable pipe and a larger pipe around it. Most exotic: Aerogel insulation (they found a cheap method to produce it a few years back).

Secondly, transmission line losses are substantial enough that reducing them would be a Very Profitable Thing.

Thirdly, though, superconducting cables aren't likely to be the way to do it. Most of the transmission losses in the power grid are inductive.

Another reason this is exciting

[hubie]

Besides that fact that the materials involved here are "cheap and easy," another interesting aspect to this is that the superconductivity appears to occur through the good 'ol BCS [bris.ac.uk] mechanism, which is your grandma's physics (not that wacky stuff they need to explain the ceramic material transitions).

Re:Warm enough for modern overclockers

[caffeinated_bunsen]

>Liquid N2 chill their processors

It's been done [octools.com]. Twice [octools.com]. Slashdot even had articles about the first [slashdot.org] one and the sequel [slashdot.org]. The trouble happens when certain semiconductors get too cold to semiconduct. (Remember, conductivity increases with temperature in a semiconductor)

That's cold

[maddogsparky]

Liquid nitrogen boils at about 77 degrees Kelvin, to warm to keep this material superconducting. Liquid helium is the next coldest liquid at 4 degrees K.

significance

[apsmith]

The first "high-Tc" superconductor was also only around 40 K - the thing was it was a new type of material (an oxide ceramic) that had previously never before been tested; similar to this case, although this time the material seems to be even simpler. With the old-style high-Tc materials it was only a few months before they got the things working above liquid nitrogen; it's possible tweaking this material will do the same thing or even better, you never know. Really exciting!