The First Room-Temperature Superconductor Has Finally Been Found (sciencenews.org) 102
Joe2020 shares a report from Science News: Now, scientists have found the first superconductor that operates at room temperature -- at least given a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of about 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues report October 14 in Nature. The team's results "are nothing short of beautiful," says materials chemist Russell Hemley of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved with the research. However, the new material's superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, limiting its practical usefulness.
Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15 degrees C, the electrical resistance vanished. That alone wasn't enough to convince Dias. "I didn't believe it the first time," he says. So the team studied additional samples of the material and investigated its magnetic properties.
Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash -- strong magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the material was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team also applied an oscillating magnetic field to the material, and showed that, when the material became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity. The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.
Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15 degrees C, the electrical resistance vanished. That alone wasn't enough to convince Dias. "I didn't believe it the first time," he says. So the team studied additional samples of the material and investigated its magnetic properties.
Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash -- strong magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the material was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team also applied an oscillating magnetic field to the material, and showed that, when the material became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity. The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.
There's always a catch (Score:5, Insightful)
"However, the new material's superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, limiting its practical usefulness."
Arrgh why can we never have nice things!
Back to the drawing board I guess.
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Arrgh why can we never have nice things!
Because otherwise it would be a super-natural thing, and would have been discovered long ago.
Re:There's always a catch (Score:5, Funny)
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96.8K
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Uranus you say, this man would like to know if this super conductor will fit up his butt:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
He can clench pretty good.
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Arrgh why can we never have nice things!
Because otherwise it would be a super-natural thing, and would have been discovered long ago.
LOL, you remind me of a former director of the Patent office. He said it should be closed down because we've discovered everything that we can discover. I think that was in the late 1800s. Don't be so sure. There are some really smart people out there and they have access to machines and information not available before.
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"I bet it's only at high pressure" was the first thing I thought when I saw the headline -- because it's always at a high pressure for these experiments.
Re:There's always a catch (Score:4, Funny)
Re:There's always a catch (Score:4, Insightful)
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But without a theoretical model, the only way to be sure is to try every possible combination of materials and structure. Brute force science. Maybe someone will get it.
Re:There's always a catch (Score:4, Insightful)
Calling this a "room temperature superconductor" is nothing but an exercise in pedantry.
Flashback to Thermo.... (Score:3)
I am just waiting for the superconductor that works at room temperature and at one atmosphere but has the volume of the solar system.
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Re: There's always a fuckwit (Score:1)
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In Soviet Russia, high pressure conducts YOU!
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Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
I have nothing other to say than I had a huge smile upon reading this.
Even at high pressure this is an amazing breakthrough because sustained cold temperatures are difficult and costly but sustained high pressure is achievable and even repackageable.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
sustained high pressure is achievable and even repackageable.
Yep, just tighten the bolts and you're good to go.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
2.6 million times air pressure is "achievable and repackageable"?
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Maybe? You might not need a _lot_ of gas compressed to this pressure for this to work. A tiny superconductor can still carry a lot of load.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
If a diamond anvil can do it, then a diamond skin around the substance should be able to hold it. Question is how thick that skin would need to be, and how much did the material contract while the pressure was applied... if it contracted enough then it could have enough kinetic energy stored in it to be quite dangerous when shattered. The paper may answer the latter.
Anyway this was described in other articles more as breaking a psychological barrier than a practical one. It lets materials scientists know they have a new path forward, to try to find other hydrogen-bond-rich materials that can superconduct at higher temperatures and lower pressures. First step seems to be trying to devise an apparatus allowing this substance's structure to be analyzed.
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If a diamond anvil can do it, then a diamond skin around the substance should be able to hold it. Question is how thick that skin would need to be, and how much did the material contract while the pressure was applied...
Maybe utilizing thermal stress similar to a Prince Rupert's drop?
if it contracted enough then it could have enough kinetic energy stored in it to be quite dangerous when shattered.
If the conductor itself is tiny, you can wrap it in a thick steel pipe that can withstand whatever explosive power is inside.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
No.
A diamond anvil works by focusing force to a very fine point (pressure is force/area). The specific form of the anvil is important here.
You can not replicate this by simply placing a diamond bubble around something.
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A diamond anvil works by focusing force to a very fine point (pressure is force/area). The specific form of the anvil is important here.
You can not replicate this by simply placing a diamond bubble around something.
Let me introduce you to the concept mechanical stress. [wikipedia.org] Mechanical stress can be internal to a material. It basically means everyday things you see around you can have intense internal forces, despite not having any outside forces acting on them.
A fine point diamond was chosen because it makes a good laboratory apparatus. By having a fine point of known area, and a load cell, the scientists can calculate the stress quite accurately. Similar to how a Rockwell hardness tester [wikipedia.org] works. It should be theoret
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Good point on tension versus compression. I was assuming the diamond must stand the same amount of tension as pressure due to the lateral squishing of the sample pulling the anvil in the lateral direction... but then I don't know much about how these anvils are constructed.
So this begs the question: what's the target pressure for our best shell material to withstand the tension?
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On the subject of concepts people need to be introduced to, perhaps you need to meet the concept of "creep".
Up in the GPa (megabar) range, you don't need a lot of movement to relax the stress by a lot. That is movement that can take place to expand your "jacket" of unobtanium, but let's neglect that because unobtanium can always be substituted by handwavium, whoch has superior mechanical properties. (The same o
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Yes.
Here is a calculator for shrink fitting collars onto shafts.
https://www.meadinfo.org/2009/... [meadinfo.org]
Just shrink fit a thick wall tube of quality steel around a shaft of the superconductor material.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually not. This has been known since about 2015 or so. Basically you metallize compounds with hydrogen under diamond anvil nearing maximum possible tolerance in pressure, and since hydrogen atoms are tiny and therefore offer almost no impact surface for electrons, specific mixes may start superconducting at high temperatures.
The problems include, but are not limited to, extreme pressures required, inability to even know what exact mix you're actually testing (also the case with this one, they literally do not know what mix it was that superconducted according to their own paper), and the fact that even diamond anvils fracture under the pressures involved.
To call this a "breakthrough" is frankly ignorant. Breakthrough was discovering these properties of hydrogen back in 2015 or so. This is just incremental "we shove semi-random metallized mixes of hydrogen and another material into our diamond anvil and pray that it starts superconducting at relevant temperature before our anvil cracks" progress that's been ongoing for a few years now.
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I don't think so. What happens to a material's freezing and boiling points as you increase pressure? They go up. So if you want to freeze something that is normally a liquid at room temperature, you can either lower its temperature to its freezing point or crank up the pressure on it (a lot) to raise its freezing point, or some combination of the two.
This is robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in the same way we won't find any natural occurrences of temperatures close to 0 Kelvin on the Earth's surface, we won't
It stinks, most likely (Score:3)
No (Score:2, Troll)
"The First Room-Temperature Superconductor Has Finally Been Found" but then "The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged." So no, it has not been found, but a shadow has been found that they think is a room-temperature-superconductor-dimensioned object.
They did some engineering and got an unexpected result, which is great, but so far the science has eluded them. More credit will go to who figures out the science than those who engineer the fi
Clickbait title. No, not this one. (Score:1)
They found something that may be a superconductor, if they knew exactly what it was. And it is of no practical use due to the pressure requirements.
Also, new battery tech is coming tomorrow!
Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
This is perfect for all those people who were thinking about colonizing the core of Jupiter. ;)
Too Hot (Score:3)
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I'll be sure to remind them to bring ice cubes.
Re: Too Hot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Aah, I get it! Slashdot *filters* the degree character.
WHY though?
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Why do Americans always write $n C?
How would I know, I'm not American. The reason why lots of people omit the degree symbol is that nobody has it on their keyboard and it's usually pretty obvious from the context whether you are referring to coulombs and this is Slashdot not a paper (where I would have used K anyway). However, if you are going to be pedantic about it at least get it right: "$n Coulomb" refers to $n people named Coulomb, If you want to refer to the derived unit of charge it is "$n coulomb".
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While the pressure might be enough the core of Jupiter is a tad over 15C at an estimated 10,000C-35,000C.
The SuperConductor connects the SuperGenerator to the SuperAirConditioner. Problem solved -- what's not to love? And I hear FedEx does deliveries off-continent so that's OK too.
Now we just have to create a SuperFilter for the AC. And don't forget to tip the installer!
In the year 2525 (Score:2)
Pressure a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
But theoretically a solvable one.
Since this is a solid, you don't need GAS pressure. You just need static pressure from a chilled solid. Two dissimilar materials with different thermal contraction rates, and a fairly thick wall, could mechanically provide this at the appropriate temperatures.
Imagine for instance, a thick copper pipe functioning as the "vise", over a hard ceramic core, both heated to something like 300C. The copper jacket pipe barely fits over the ceramic core at this temperature. the superconducting material is applied, the core inserted into the jacket, then the assemblage is cooled. The copper contracts radically more than the ceramic core, and "Crunches down" onto it, providing the mechanical pressure needed.
(Or any other combination of highly dissimilar materials)
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copper? we're talking 40 million psi. diamond anvil used for a reason, there are carbides with tungsten, boron and other metals that take that kind of pressure in machining but they fail eventually.
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Hydraulic Press Channel leaves the chat.
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Those guys get into the 4000 psi range, impressive stuff but.... we're talking ten thousand times more. Claiming we could make some bar of material that could stretch across significant length of the country that could hold that pressure inside indefinitely, or even a few days, is crazy talk.
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Imagine for instance, a thick copper pipe functioning as the "vise", over a hard ceramic core, both heated to something like 300C. The copper jacket pipe barely fits over the ceramic core at this temperature. the superconducting material is applied, the core inserted into the jacket, then the assemblage is cooled. The copper contracts radically more than the ceramic core, and "Crunches down" onto it, providing the mechanical pressure needed.
Are you sure copper has the tensile strength required to not just tear apart? Or any material you can make pipes from? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there is probably a reason why all this high pressure research is done using tiny diamond anvils and not just heated copper pipes...
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Copper probably does not, but the idea was more to demonstrate a concept, rather than a specific solution.
Note the parenthetical at the end-- "Or whatever other dissimilar materials"
It would likely require something more like inconel rather than straight up copper.
Re:Pressure a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It would likely require something more like inconel rather than straight up copper.
One of the high pressure examples I found for inconel is the combustion chamber of SpaceX's SuperDraco rocket engine at 6,900 kilopascals. This super conductor requires 260,000,000 kilopascals of pressure.
I think a material that could form a pipe and hold material at that pressure would actually be as exotic as a 1 atm room temperature super conductor. I mean, at that kind of pressure you're well on the way to being able to store large amounts of metallic hydrogen!
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Yes, but imagine this sort of thing compressing nano scales wires like in computer chips. Maybe some process could cause extreme forces like this on a superconducting wire only a few atoms thick.
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Inconel isn't used for its tensile strength. It is used for its tolerance of high temperature. It is actually a comparatively weak metal.
A carbide-tungsten steel tube would just need enough of a wall thickness to compress a tiny center.
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Tungsten carbide has a tensile strength of, what, 344,000 KPa? Wouldn't trying to store 260,000,000 KPa just result in the stored material forming incursions into the pipe wall?
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But theoretically a solvable one.
Possibly but it's a lot easier to cool things down to liquid nitrogen temperatures where we have superconductors working at normal pressure than it will be to provide the insane pressures this requires. We need room temperature and pressure superconductors.
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Re:Pressure a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that equation (Barlow's Formula) probably doesn't hold up in extreme cases like this, even if I'm using it correctly in the first place. It's probably okay for a rough ballpark though. I think you had a good idea, but I don't think it would actually work.
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2.8 million psi (Score:2)
At that pressure any material would become anything the hell you want it to become. It's the equivalent of waterboarding a human.
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Re:2.8 million psi (Score:4, Informative)
155 gigapascals is 1.55 M bar, or... 22.5 million PSI. But thanks for checking before replying.
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Lol, 22.5 million PSI instead of 37 million PSI. Oh yeah so much better.
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You realize the person you replied to isn't the one who wrote 2.8 million psi, right?
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At that pressure any material would become anything the hell you want it to become. It's the equivalent of waterboarding a human.
Ok so who can we waterboard to achieve superconducting?
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At that pressure any material would become anything the hell you want it to become. It's the equivalent of waterboarding a human.
Ok so who can we waterboard to achieve superconducting?
Anybody.. Just dip them in liquid nitrogen and you can have super conducting things..
Compared to the high pressures involved here, a little bit of cold is EASY Peasy..
Superconducting maglevs (Score:4, Interesting)
We already have a type of superconductor, BSSCO (Bi-2234 in particular), that could allow superconducting maglevs in places like Shackleton crater on the moon and on Titan. Why aren't we doing that? Public transportation could be improved there.
Re:Superconducting maglevs (Score:4, Funny)
There aren't enough commuters on Titan to make it economically viable.
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Not the first (Score:5, Informative)
The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.
This is not the first, not by a long shot. Using high pressure to hold excess O2 in the crystal structure of a superconductor is nothing new.
Japanese researchers made room temperature superconductor bulk pellets in the late1980's. A journal article search should turn up the published papers. I no longer have access to a research library, and since this stuff occurred before the interwebs, it doesn't pop up on a google search. From memory:
Oxide powders of Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu (BSCCO) were ground, pressed into a pellet, sintered at 950C in a pure O2 environment (or was it 900C?), ground, pressed back into a pellet, sintered in O2 again several times, demonstrated both Meissner effect and a zero resistance transition via a 4-point probe at temperatures above ambient. The original paper was hilarious, as the Japanese researchers first spent months trying to figure out what was wrong with their 4-point probe and cryostat, until they realized the zero resistance at room temperature was in fact real, and their equipment wasn't broken.
As an undergrad, and under the direction of an advisor and a grad student, I repeated this paper, but instead of starting off with oxide powders, we used citrate & acetate solutions to mix on a molecular level, then oxidized away all the carbon, then sintered the chemically mixed oxides in pure O2. The resulting powders exhibited Meissner effect immediately upon removing from the furnace and while still warm. Meissner effect gradually diminished until no longer observed within about 30 minutes.
The Japanese pressed their very finely ground and re-ground powders into such a tight pellet that huge internal pressures were preserved in the perovskite structure of the sintered ceramic pellet. It took many months, but O2 migrated out of their ceramic pellets, eventually leaving behind superconductors that transitioned around the more typical 80 kelvin.
In the grand scheme of things, a room temperature superconductor is not necessary to achieve amazing things - a high critical current is what is important. Too high of a magnetic field, just like too high of a temperature, and superconductivity is lost.
Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than beer, so cooling a high critical field superconductor is not typically prohibitive - but getting enough current out of a high temperature superconductor was not easy back in the day.
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I thought you might be exaggerating, so I looked it up. Turns out, not only is liquid nitrogen cheaper than beer, it's actually cheaper than retail bottled water (not counting the cost of the containers and handling).
slow progress (Score:2)
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LoL, I was right :D (Score:2)
I bet that they would eventually find a room temperature superconductor, and it would be organic (that means it's carbon based), and that there would still be something that would make it pretty much useless for some reason. (I was thinking limited current, big magn
lol as an Internet meme (Score:1)
I never understood the Bible verse about calling your brother "thou fool" (King James rendering) as being a sufficient crime to be damned to eternal torment. But then I learned about those wacky social scientists trying to understand which marriages dissolve in divorce, which ones last. Their common denominator of failed marriages is expressions of contempt, body-language gestures such as eye rolling are a good start.
So maybe it is rhetorical exaggeration to say someone will roast in Gehenna for callin
Uh-oh. (Score:2)
Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.
Orange and hair challenged? (Score:2)
You are not one of those anti-Science un-Believer Trump people who is against civil discourse and who thinks it cool to denigrate other people?
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Quite the opposite. On all counts.
I just find lengthy posts sophistically referencing biblical passages in order to pick a fight regarding a colloquial contraction/phrase completely unrelated to the topic of discussion a bit... grouchy.
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I use the word Bozos here, not to call the researchers that but as illustrative of saying they are considered "funny" because a Bozo is a stock clown character, and clowns entertain through humor?
"No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable."
—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
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No, you didn't predict anything. Extreme pressure has enabled other materials to be superconductors at merely "chilly", aka "near room temperature", most people just don't follow the subject. Nothing surprising about it, cold prevents the thermal disruption of the cooper pairs, extreme pressure limits the movement too.
High pressure is *not* such a big problem. (Score:1)
High pressure times small surface area still equals meh pressure. So given a chip. And given perhaps segmentation into compartments ...
Like (Score:2)
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deep in the ocean maybe? inside a gas giant? Jupiter or Saturn. Maybe we have not found the right spot to put or cool stuff ;)
The ocean isn't deep enough, yet, maybe global warming will give us the few thousand miles more of water? Jupiter and Saturn may be usable, just very inconvenient...
Sounds like a barrier penetration event (Score:2)
almost not news (Score:2)
Other extreme pressure/near room superconductive materials have been found in the last 10 years. Lanthanum decahydride can do it at -10 degrees F... just needs a mere 23 million psi of pressure to make and maintain, lolz.
I'm probably wrong but how about cold fusion? (Score:2)
I may have misremembered, or be totally wrong, but wasn't a big obstacle to cold fusion was that we needed higher temperature superconductors with some scientists saying a "room temperature" superconductor" would be the ideal breakthrough in allowing for cold fusion to be possible? If so this could be the breakthrough needed for it.
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allowing for cold fusion to be possible? If so this could be the breakthrough needed for it.
One of the reasons that Fleischmann and Pons were given more credence when announcing Cold Fusion is because high-temperature superconductivity had been discovered just three years earlier....something many physicists and chemists believed impossible. It tended to make everyone a bit more open-minded about accepting a new natural phenomenon that couldn't possibly exists.
This book has an interesting take on the whole affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thank you, now I wanna get that book, looks very interesting.
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In your future (Score:2)
In your future: exploding wires.
Could earth core have superconductors? (Score:1)