Silicon Superconductors 141
Diana writes "Physicists at CNRS have demonstrated superconductivity in silicon, the element long known for its semiconducting properties. High doping is the key — by substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms, it was found that the resistance of the material drops sharply when cooled below 0.35 K. A small increase in the transition temperature is likely with further work."
OK, science is cool and everything (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OK, science is cool and everything (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason... (Score:2)
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Just when I thought I saw it all, something like this comes along.
Making science popular to younsters is fine and all, but come on!
This is getting silly, I have to protest!
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So..... (Score:4, Funny)
Makes me want to get back to the pub.
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by substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms
That makes me wonder if it is still legitimately considered silicon. I mean, replacing nearly 10% of it with another element must mean that it falls into another classification. I don't think it could be considered a compound since the atoms are not bonding in the traditional sense, they are simply occupying places in a crystalline structure. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call it a "silicon-based material"
Re:So..... (Score:5, Informative)
An alloy, if you will?
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So no, it's not pure elemental silicon, but it's still
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Bullshit. Dump 10% Kool-aid powder in there and get Kool-aid. Stick a teabag in there and get tea. Run it through some beans and get coffee.
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After your good and 'doped' up do we throw you in the freezer and run a current through you?
Oh, you are naughty... (Score:2)
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How useful is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
What non-consumer applications will it have? Getting something down to
IIRC, anything that doesn't superconduct at the temp of liquid nitrogen is a pain in the ass to use.
Re:How useful is this? (Score:4, Informative)
Secondly, just because things are a pain in the ass doesn't mean they don't have useful applications. NMR/MRI have been dependent on low-temp superconductors (i.e. liquid He or even colder) for decades, and they're immensely important for research and medicine.
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I'm sure most of the people studying electron band structure of p and n doped silicon could never have
Re:How useful is this? (Score:4, Funny)
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In space it is.
Cheers,
CC
superconducting semiconductor? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:superconducting semiconductor? (Score:4, Informative)
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Be Sure To Practice Safe Si (Score:5, Funny)
"Because it has one fewer electron than Suzie available for bonding with neighbouring atoms, Tom incorporated into Suzie leaves a positively-charged "hole" at each site where Tom's "missing" electron would be paired with one of Suzie's."
Well they did do it in France, you know.
Missing the point... (Score:4, Funny)
(Yes, that happened; and yes, he is still in band director.)
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Windows, windows uber alles...
A popular favorite in his class.
Boron (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when did science have to have applications?
(This isn't sarcasm; science is about discovery. Applications of those discoveries are mostly accident. You can't automatically "succeed" at science. Failing to find a room-temperature superconductor isn't failing per se; it means succeeding to eliminate another coulda been material. Finding dead ends is part of the quest. And this result might not yet be a dead end.)
So far, most of the comments have been posted by boring morons.
-A bored moron
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Negative re
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Each hypothesis, independent from it's origin, still has to undergo evaluation, until it finally dies in an experiment which proves, that the hypothesis is wrong, or it goes thrown out because it is only a restatement o
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For backround: I'm in the bioinformatics field. One of the last papers we published was on the effects of selection on conserved non-coding sequences. There were a number of hypothesis for the effect we were observing w
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Too Much Battlestar Galactica. (Score:3, Funny)
they got it all backwards (Score:3, Funny)
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0.35K is rather cold (Score:5, Informative)
I work on a radiotelescope that uses receivers cooled to 4K. These use a helium refrigerator that works just like the Freon thing in your car but using helium instead of Freon as the phase-change medium. It takes three stages of cooling (with compressors and heat exchangers) to get to the 4K point. It also takes 10 kW of electrical power to cool one watt of load to 4K.
We until recently had one receiver, a bolometer, that was cooled to 0.4K using the 3He isotope of helium that has a lower boiling point. The refrigerator for this is a fist-sized gadget that uses a charcoal trap, a heater resistor and some plumbing to make a refrigerator that can be cycled to produce 0.4K for a day or so at a time. It makes many microwatts of 0.4K coldness from less than one watt of 4K coldness.
Unfortunately, the 3He leaked out and the gizmo is currently a paperweight since it was made by a very clever French guy who's no longer in the business.
You can still buy 3He refrigerators from other manufacturers, but they are two feet long. The 3He is available for several thousand dollars a bottle.
Re:0.35K is rather cold (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding the Helium 3 Fridge, that's actually doing the EXACT same thing as the 1K pot above, you're evaporatively pumping He3 with the charcoal sorb. Since He3 is rare and expensive, this is done in a closed system and recycled.
I know your pain, though, our He3 fridge has a leak, luckily not on the He3 system (He3 is super expensive), and it's been a pain in the ass to try to fix. To fix your system, you probably don't need that French dude to fix it, get a leak checker (find some experimental condensed matter guys that do vacuum sputtering or evaporation work, they'll have a leak checker), track down the leak on your He3 system, plug the leak (silver solder if possible w/ your machine shop), then pay some $$$ to inject some He3 back in when you're damn sure you've got no more leaks left.
Re: 0.35K is rather cold (Score:2)
Their site seems to be down right now, but it must be a temporary glitch.
This will be useful in low temperature physics (Score:5, Interesting)
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We already have designs for sensors made out of silicon, and I bet these superconductors integrate fairly well with normal computer components...
Doping (Score:1, Redundant)
--
Now, that's a sig!
start the car (Score:5, Funny)
Anything but that... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Without saying it aloud, we all knew the survival of the ship...our survival...was totally dependent on staying out of sensor range for just a bit longer. The sub-orbital alerting buoys, with their grid-
doping boron (Score:1)
Pamela Anderson (Score:2, Funny)
Things (Score:3, Funny)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:1)
Superconducting CPU (Score:2)
Superconducting Semiconductors (Score:2, Interesting)
If these guys have done their work carefully, they will have gone to great lengths to ensure that they
Potentially not as important as it seems (Score:2)
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am in space.
BTW, 0.35 K = -272 C
Space is around 2.7K or, -270 C (Assuming no Extraneous Radiation)
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Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:4, Informative)
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Liquid nitrogen is only 77K. No where near cold enough.
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Of course there are, but this isn't one of them.
Which is not to say that the result is uninteresting, but the idea that you're going to pop gadgets based on this technology inside of MRI machines is a little ahead of it's time.
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The MRI machines use super-conducting material cooled with liquid nitrogen
Umm...no. MRI's are cooled with liquid helium. Much colder, and much more expensive. I used to work for an industrial gas company and we serviced several MRI centers. It was always a time-critical thing: as long as you kept liquid HE in them, they would stay cold. If an MRI runs out (delivery truck late or some such thing) it takes a lot more to bring the magnet back down to the right temp.
Helium is freakin' expensive too. We would go to extraordinary measures in order to keep a magnet from quenching
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Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:4, Insightful)
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Please keep the profanity to yourself
Now there's something not seen every day - a wannabe list-mom, not afraid to strike out. Wickedly delivered, sure to strike fear in the heart of the evil-doer you've so publically chastised. Can we have another?
Let me offer just a small bit of advice, and remember, it is promised to be worth exactly what you paid for it.
Stop - don't do that again. You'll only bring attention to yourself as being a target ripe for kicking, while setting yourself up for a tight-fitting suit of frustration. Most forums h
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I'm pointing out that in my opinion an ill informed idiot is also a pointlessly swearing idiot. A worthless argument suddenly carries weight and gets attention becuase it makes it look like strong feelings are involved - it looked to me like pointless swearing to get attention to a stupid argument. For some reason this made me think of marketing people creeping into slash
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I am going to ignore the name-calling you wielded in that same statement. Who says there has to be a point to swearing? In fact, last I checked this is supposed to be a new millennium staffed with new and improved intelligent human beings. An intelligent human will immediately dismiss the entire concept of 'swear' words, 'bad' words, and 'profanity' as illogical nonsense. Words can no more be profane or bad than guns can kill people. Words, Guns, Knives, Hammers, Racks, Hack Saws
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Have you actually read the post this was in reply to? Now what do you think it was advocating and why do you think I object to that?
How do you extrapolate all this from three words? Most if not all of it is totally wrong - I can answer easily with a bit of name calling to save time - that I am offended by what I see as a loud attention seeking luddite that is using a bit of profanity to get that attention. All this pop sociology or whate
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Thanks.
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Good idea - considering what you called Robert Cresanti.
I should finally point out what is spelt out above - that I said it was in my OPINION the person is a both an idiot and pointlessly swearing idiot. With just a few words there is little way to know if I am just some guy off the street or the moral crusader that bit your dog so hold on there. I object to what the poster said and the attention grabbing hence the comment - people s
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Note to self. A random individual on Slashdot nick'd as somersault is the ultimate authority on the English language and utility of the words contained therein. All must refer to his vast wisdom before using a verb or adjective to determine if that word is of the proper variety and worthwhile utility.
"then of course the words themselves can generate emotions. It's not illogical."
If someone routin
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Maybe it was a lame example, but it fits neatly enough.
"Words hold meaning."
You are confusing the words with the things they represent. Words are groupings of sounds. They are attributed meaning, they don't actually have any intrinsic meaning of their own. For example, the words 'shit', 'crap', and 'excrement' all have the same meaning. All three words convey the same thing, none is any more 'proper' or 'descriptive' as you put it a couple posts ago. Yet I listed them in the order of
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It's a bit stupid, but when I think of shit I think of something that smells more than crap, probably because I used to hear the phrase dogshit quite a lot, so physically
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Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:5, Funny)
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They are called radio waves. Rush Limbaugh's voice isn't really coming from the sky.
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Re:So who the fuck cares (Score:5, Informative)
In the 1830s, it was discovered that some materials acted as neither pure conductors nor pure insulators. They called them semiconductors, and they were a curiosity until the 1890s, when they were found to be useful as rectifiers and photovoltaic cells. Another 40 years later, and people started to consider them as a replacement for the triode vacuum tube, which was immensely useful but fragile and difficult to deal with.
Pure research in new directions isn't just allowed because it 'might lead to something,' it's absolutely essential in order to progress beyond refinement of the existing.
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Nasty.
Now if I take a BiSiCuYt superconductor at a low temperature it superconducts, higher and it semiconducts, room temperature and it insulates. Why is this so? Has the mechanism behind superconductivity been worked out in the last couple of years when I wasn't paying attention - and can you explain it?
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So just what WOULD you use a superconducting biscuit for, anyway?
{Sorry, couldn't resist....}
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Mod the parent down (Score:2)
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I could be wrong ( no, no it happens sometimes) but the point the GP appeared to be making is that the pursuit of pure knowledge is of itself a worthwhile goal. There have over the centuries been many discoveries without an apparent pupose at the time. However as well as being a species of exploreres and scientists we're also (as slashdot's pp
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Oh, I don't know about that. Imagine a pair of enhanced breasts, little stalactites of ice hanging from the nipples, provocatively visible through a lace bra made of advanced insulation, while thousands of amperes surge through the underlying silicone with virtually no loss at all. It'd be like... the "mother's milk of power!"(tm)
I, for one, welcome our super-
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that also mean we get to keep all the cute chix0rs
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much anything will superconduct below 0.35K. How is this news?
Actually, no, many things do not superconduct at arbitrarily low temperature, common examples being some of the best room-temperatures conductors we know of (eg copper and gold). Pure silicon also does not superconduct, as explained in TFA, which was known for some time.
As for this being news, well it interests me because I do experimental research with superconductors. But I'm surprised it made the front page of slashdot.
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The electrical resistivity of a metallic conductor decreases gradually as the temperature is lowered. However, in ordinary conductors such as copper and silver, impurities and other defects impose a lower limit. Even near absolute zero a real sample of copper shows a non-zero resistance.
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C'mon, this is Slashdot. News of matter, stuff for nerds.