Metamaterial Superconductor Hints At New Era of High Temperature Superconductors 39
KentuckyFC writes: Superconductors allow current to flow with zero resistance when cooled below some critical temperature. They are the crucial ingredients in everything from high-power magnets and MRI machines to highly sensitive magnetometers and magnetic levitation devices. But one big problem is that superconductors work only at very low temperatures — the highest is around 150 kelvin (-120 degrees centigrade). So scientists would dearly love to find ways of raising this critical temperature. Now a group of physicists say they've found a promising approach: to build metamaterial superconductors that steer electrons in the same way as other metamaterials steer light to create invisibility cloaks. The inspiration for the work comes from the observation that some high temperature superconductors consist of repeated layers of conducting and dielectric structures. So the team mixed tin — a superconductor at 3.7 kelvin — with the dielectric barium titanate and found that it raised the critical temperature by 0.15 kelvin. That's the first demonstration that superconductors can be thought of as metamaterials. With this proof of principle under their belts, the next step is to look for bigger gains at higher temperatures.
150 kelvin = -189.67 F (Score:2, Informative)
Re:0.15 degree from a 3.7 kelvin... that's "cool" (Score:5, Informative)
I never ... (Score:4, Informative)
... metamaterial I didn't like and stuff.
Re:150 kelvin = -189.67 F (Score:3, Informative)
Re:150 kelvin = -189.67 F (Score:2, Informative)
If you ask me, 10 millimeters to a centimeter, 10 centimeters to a decimeter, 10 decimeter to a meter, 10 meters to a decameter, 10 decameters to a hectometer, and 10 hectometers to a kilometer, and so on is just bloody easy.
If you want to convert millimeters to kilometers, it's dead simple as it's just operations of 10, which you might be more familiar with as moving the decimal point depending on your math classes. And by the way, that is 1,000,000 millimeters is one kilometer, no calculator needed for such a simple conversion.
Now for your next trick, try converting 16ths of an inch to a mile. I'm not sadistic, you can use a calculator, and good luck.