Superconducting Buckyballs

chinton writes: "Yahoo! has a story about using buckyballs to achieve superconductivity at warmer tempuratures. They did this by combining carbon-60 with chloroform and bromoform. The advance would have been made sooner, but the scientists kept passing out. ;-)"

Competition is good

[MarkusH]

They managed to get carbon to superconduct at tempertures higher than liquid nitrogen (with potential for even higher temperatures), is potentially cheaper than other types of superconductivity and could be easier to work with then the copper-oxide ceramics.

If things keep advancing like they are, it won't be too many years until we get superconductive wire available to the general public. I would love to be able to run down to radio shack and pick up a spool of superconducting wire for all sorts of home projects.

Re:Competition is good

[BobGregg]

>They managed to get carbon to superconduct at
>temperatures higher than liquid nitrogen

Well, slight correction. Liquid nitrogen is liquid at, what, about -70F? The story cites the experiment as achieving superconductivity at -243F, higher than liquid *helium* (and thus a hell of a lot cheaper to reproduce), but still well below liquid nitrogen. And it isn't like you can get a spool of this stuff to superconduct; it has to be immersed in two different super-cooled chemicals to remain in that state.

This isn't even the highest-temperature superconductivity ever produced - but it does appear to be the cheapest, and that's a major advance in and of itself.

Re:Slight Correction

[Kotetsu]

Actually, the boiling point of nitrogen is -196 [mit.edu]C (about 70 K), well below the temperature required for this superconductivity. Ya gotta love when articles use degrees Fahrenheit as the units in a scientific article. It never fails to confuse somebody.

Re:Competition is good

[emok]

Competition is good for superconductors.

Competition is bad for slashdot articles [slashdot.org].

And for those of us that use real temperatures...

[dmatos]

... it's about 117 Kelvin.

Relatively inexpensive, and getting warmer all the time. I'm looking forward to the day...

Another new use

[Faux_Pseudo]

Looks like they can also be used to cause slashdot writers to post the same story twice in one week.

Looks Like Yahoo! Also Posts Twice

[Self Bias Resistor]

Sure does. And this phenomenon is not just confined to Slashdot either. The links to the Yahoo! articles also show that two very similar articles were published on this very topic no more than sixteen minutes apart (2:03PM ET and 2:19PM ET). The only difference in the articles was the source - the earlier article's source was Associated Press whereas the later article's source was Reuters.

so what

[mojo-raisin]

... scientists in Anchorage, Alaska have already discovered a material that superconducts at room temperature