6 ms·
Superconductivity record sparks wave of follow-up physics
- mcphage 11y agoAt 203K... and 1.5 million atmospheres of pressure.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoWow, that should not be understated!
- jgamman 11y agobut still... 203K!? i remember the 90s when the last round of leap frogging superconductor materials were being developed - every conference even vaguely related to solid state chem/physics seemed to set a new record. And H2S? it's hardly an exotic material. maybe it's just the (near dead) chemist in me geeking out ;-)
- cbd1984 11y ago> the (near dead) chemist Work around enough H2S and it will take you the rest of the way. My point is, it has enough problems with flagrant toxicity that containment of non-trivial amounts of it will be either massively expensive, totally inadequate (especially in the event of an earthquake, fire, fire caused by earthquake...), or both.
- Shivetya 11y agowhich means we can have our Star Trek future, we got a great poison with a needed application and all we need is exploding computer displays. Massively expensive is not a limitation if the need is there.
- venomsnake 11y agoThat is not that high ... after all we need a pipe only couple of microns thick.
- baq 11y agothat's not exactly true, when you feed a superconductor too much current, it breaks down, and it can take more if it's "fatter".
- dantiberian 11y agoThis would certainly give new meaning to the phrase "Letting out the magic smoke". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke
- nickhalfasleep 11y agoI wonder if any of the Gas Giants in system reach this at any depth of their atmosphere? Jupiter and Saturn look too hot. But Uranus or Neptune?
- chris_va 11y agoIf I'm reading this right, it gets up to ~600K by the time it hits the right pressure for Neptune. http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2005/03/aa1695/aa1695.html http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2005/03/aa1695/aa1695....
- idlewords 11y agoH2S fun facts! It's more lethal than hydrogen cyanide, and despite its powerful stench at low concentrations (detectable by humans at half a part per billion), it becomes odorless (by paralyzing your sense of smell) right around when you need to start getting worried. "A diagnostic clue of extreme poisoning by H2S is the discolouration of copper coins in the pockets of the victim"
- beloch 11y agoSafety procedure when working around sour gas wells (natural gas with H2S) is that, if you see somebody drop in front of you, you do not touch him, approach him, or anything else. You just get the hell outta there. If he's been dropped by H2S, trying to move him is just going to cause you to go down too. Besides being bloody lethal, H2S is notorious for being corrosive. H2S forms metal sulfides with any exposed metal it can access, and the hydrogen byproduct often diffuses through the metal and forms expanding holidays in positions of stress, potentially to the point that the metal will crack. I've worked around high power free-space infrared lasers where a single stray reflection could instantly blind you permanently (and you can't see infrared light scattering off of stuff like you can with visible lasers). I'd rather spend years working with those than spend one afternoon in a lab with a sample of H2S at 140 GPa. I don't care if it's inside a diamond anvil cell inside a cryostat. High pressure H2S has got to be a freakin' nightmare to work with. I'm sure H2S has lots of funky properties nobody knows about because practically nobody wants to work with the stuff. Kudos to the PI who convinced a bunch of grad student peons to put their lives on the line... I suppose.
- ars 11y ago> in a lab with a sample of H2S at 140 GPa. High pressure H2S has got to be a freakin' nightmare to work with. They probably have absolutely tiny quantities of the stuff under pressure. Not enough to hurt anyone even if it escaped.
- beloch 11y agoReading the arxiv preprint, they fed H2S into a DAC using a capillary. The size of the sample under pressure was 1um thick and 10 um in diameter, which is indeed tiny. So, that's probably not so bad. Anyone who thinks this would make a great room temperature superconductor in real applications had better smarten up though.
- mkoryak 11y agoIs bringing a substance to 1.5 million atm cheaper than cooling it to under -70C ? All the articles I read on the topic seem to imply that higher temperatures are much more important than a bit of super high pressure, but can someone explain why?
- danarlow 11y agoThe big application for superconductors is wire, and it's much harder to compress a wire to a million atm than it is to cool it to -70 C. However, this result is important (if independently replicated) because it demonstrates that the established theory of low temperature superconductivity [1] has predictive power all the way up to these high temperatures and likely to room temperature, providing new motivation for theoretical chemists to dream up new materials that the theory predicts would superconduct under more accessible conditions. Practical room temperature superconductors would, in my opinion, change the world as much as the development of semiconductors. [1] a modified version of BCS Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory
- Turing_Machine 11y ago"Practical room temperature superconductors would, in my opinion, change the world as much as the development of semiconductors" It would be huge, definitely. Even the most obvious application (reducing electric power transmission losses) would be worth billions. According to the Googles, ~4000 TWh generated annually, 6% transmission losses, $.09/kWh gives about $22 billion in annual savings in the United States alone (if I didn't mess up the arithmetic).
- tedsanders 11y agoNot necessarily. Even if we successfully developed a room temperature superconductor, there would still be huge commercial hurdles. Cost, mechanical stability, thermal stability, manufacturability, transportability, sensitivity to heat waves, reliability, critical field (which limits current), density, tensile strength, etc. Also, while $22 billion in annual savings sounds big, the grid is extremely capital intensive, and would take decades and trillions of dollars to upgrade.
- eghad 11y agoIf anyone is wondering how we're capable of testing these under 150 GPa, read up on Diamond Anvil Cells (they're palm-sized): https://str.llnl.gov/str/pdfs/03_96.2.pdf https://str.llnl.gov/str/pdfs/03_96.2.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
- analognoise 11y agoThanks, my Google-fu was weak and kept getting me pages on unit conversion. :)
- steve19 11y agoIs room temperature super conductivity theoretically possible?
- idlewords 11y agoDepends on how many sweaters you have.
- delecti 11y agoWell I'm not aware of any commonly accepted current theories of super conductivity that say a room temperature one is necessarily impossible, so I suppose implicitly yes.
- thangalin 11y agohttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/full/nature13875.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/full/nature1...
- acjohnson55 11y agoIt was right under our noses, all along!
- tlb 11y agoI don't have a good mental model of solids at very high pressures. Temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, but because the atoms are squeezed closer together the stiffness of the lattice is higher, therefore the displacement due thermal vibrations at a given temperature is less. I wonder if the displacement at 203K and 1.5M atm is similar to the displacement at which conventional BCS superconductors operate.
- jessriedel 11y agoThis is a really interesting framing. If it's the correct way to think about things, it would really put a damper on the importance of warm-temperatures/extreme-pressure superconductors.
- dunkelheit 11y agoActually in thermodynamic terms temperature is a measure of how entropy (disorder) increases when you increase internal energy. Not the most intuitive definition (you can't just go and buy entropyometer for example ;)) but it works even when quantum effects kick in. And for ideal gas this measure happens to be proportional to the kinetic energy of the particles.
- dunkelheit 11y ago> other hydrogen compounds may be good candidates for high-temperature superconductivity too If this is true there will be a mini gold rush in this space in the next couple of years. Maybe the record will not stand for very long.
- eddyb 11y agoEvery time I see news of sub-zero superconductivity I get reminded that this site exists http://superconductors.org/ http://superconductors.org/ and there's no debunking or confirming of anything on it. You'd think that all these years, someone with the right equipment would at least have the least bit of curiosity and try out one of those crystal configurations. If it doesn't work, make it public, maybe repeat the negative findings a few times and nobody would have to wonder "but what if?". If it does work, well, the rest of the thread explains what would happen to technology in that case. One odd theory I've come across is that he may be intentionally avoiding publicity just enough so that he can get patents filed for everything before any of this stuff starts being used in production. While that's too much conspiracy for me, it's either that or "nobody knows (or cares) whether he's a charlatan or not" and it keeps bugging me until I forget about it.