5 ms·
Nobody wants "high temperature" superconductors. They want superconductors at roughly standard temperature and pressure. This is only an advance by the extremel
by Zanni 7y ago
Nobody wants "high temperature" superconductors. They want superconductors at roughly standard temperature and pressure. This is only an advance by the extremely artificial metric of considering temperature only. Ceramic superconductors work at liquid nitrogen temperatures and standard pressure, which is much more accessible.
I'm not raging at ttsda. It is an advance. Of sorts. But not nearly as much as the headline suggests.
- hoseja 7y agoI thought "high temperature", when talking about superconductors, basically means any temperature above the boiling point of nitrogen...
- chaboud 7y agoI think you may mean below. Basically, low temperature superconductors (e.g. niobium titanium) are liquid helium cooled. High temperature superconductors (e.g. YBCO, BSCCO) are everything else, but generally liquid nitrogen cooled.
- jeffwass 7y agoThe headline is accurate. In the scientific community, High-Tc superconductors typically refer to Type II superconductors, eg cuprates. And the “High-Tc” term means above temperatures relative to the usual elemental superconductor Tc’s, eg about 20K or so. Materials that can superconduct above 77K are especially sought after since they can be cooled with only liquid nitrogen, much cheaper and abundant than liquid helium.
- gaze 7y agoYou’re vastly underestimating what the significance of what this is part of. High Tc superconductivity was thought to be essentially dead. Extremely few significant new results for decades. Now this and magic angle twisted graphene and some other stuff. It’s really really cool. It’s like we’re watching an entire field thawing and lurching forward.
- galangalalgol 7y agoIs the graphene thing dead? One paper indicated graphene or even graphite soaked in a hydrocarbon would superconduct at room temperature. I was so excited I purhased some and tried that, it had a DC impedance similar to dry graphite...
- TeMPOraL 7y agoDid you buy graphene or graphite? If the former, maybe what you got wasn't actually graphene? Apperently, the progress in this field is held back by most suppliers selling something they claim that's graphene but really isn't (or is of garbage quality) - https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/graphene-you-dont-get-what-you-pay-for https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/gr....
- deelowe 7y agoWhat's wrong with high pressure superconductors? At least those don't require constant energy input, which would seem to be an improvement.
- sfasfsafd 7y agoat a 1E6 atm, it's beyond useless for any practical application (unlike "normal" superconductors that can be used with a bit of N2 plumbing). If you scroll through the paper, you'll see they talk about using a diamond anvil. Even if we could compress anything other than a spec of this stuff, it would still require massive amounts of PV work to achieve the P required.
- irq-1 7y agoThis is addressed in the second to last paragraph: > The effort to manufacture synthetic diamond provided substantial motivation for the development of high-pressure methods. Today, however, synthetic diamonds are grown using a low-pressure technique called chemical-vapour deposition. Optimistically, it might eventually be possible to use similar low-pressure methods to produce metastable superconducting compounds that are initially discovered at high pressure.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThe maximum current and magnetic field you can apply to a supercondutor correlates very well with Tc, and it is likely that they are intrinsically linked so this correlation is unavoidable. So, no, everybody cares about high temperature superconducors, because the higher the temperature, the strongest magnet you can build out of them.