Warning: Science Content! It's pretty big news though

Jstas

Here is the article first of all:

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=HTTOTGYXPCPWSQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=206904213


Ok, so what's so big about room temperature superconductors? Well, from the article:

Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.

So what's a superconductor? A geeky explanation is the simplest way to put it:

Superconducting metals work by binding electrons into pairs called Cooper pairs whose motion can be coupled into long chains of electrons. Those electrons are synchronized with the conductor's lattice vibrations (when cooled near absolute zero), thereby avoiding the collisions with metal atoms that define resistance.

Essentially, what that definition is saying is that resistance is a manifestation of electrically excited atoms colliding. Those collisions create changes in the charge of the atoms which cause the atoms to either fight or be attracted to the charge of the electricity running through the material.

In a super conductor, the material is cooled to near 0 degrees Kelvin which is absolute 0. The colder they get, the more likely the atoms will bind in Cooper pairs. The Cooper pairs line up in a chain of electrons that synchronize the atomic orbits with the lattice vibrations of the material those atoms make up.

A Cooper pair is:

A Cooper pair is the name given to electrons that are bound together in a certain manner first described by Leon Cooper. Cooper showed that an arbitrarily small attraction between electrons in a metal can cause a paired state of electrons to have a lower energy than the Fermi energy, which implies that the pair is bound. In normal superconductors, this attraction is due to the electron phonon interaction. The Cooper Pair state forms the basis of the BCS theory of superconductivity developed by John Bardeen, John Schrieffer and Leon Cooper for which they shared the 1972 Nobel Prize.

A simplified explanation: an electron in a metal normally behaves as basically a free particle. The electron is repelled from other electrons due to their similar charge, but it also attracts the positive ions that make up the rigid lattice of the metal. This attraction can distort the positively charged ions in such a way as to attract other electrons (the electron-phonon interaction). This attraction due to the displaced ions can overcome the electrons repulsion due to the electrons having the same charge and cause them to pair-up. Generally, the pairing only occurs at low temperatures and is quite weak, meaning the paired electrons may still be many hundreds of nanometers apart.

A Lattice Vibration is:

In physics, a phonon is a quantized mode of vibration occurring in a rigid crystal lattice, such as the atomic lattice of a solid.[1] The study of phonons is an important part of solid state physics, because phonons play a major role in many of the physical properties of solids, including a material's thermal and electrical conductivities.

So what is happening is that the electrons in the atoms have an oscillation in the orbits and they synchronize the oscillations with the phonon of the material. This brings resistance way, way down to very close to 0 resistance if not 0 resistance. Since everything is vibrating in step, none of the atoms collide and the electricity flows like a surfer on an ocean wave.



This is a big deal because technology like this will change everything electrical from power generation to power storage and transmitting anything with an electrical signal. Everything from batteries to speaker wire will be rethought. You think computers are fast now, you ain't seen nothing yet! Magnets built with superconductors can actually generate electricity from the EM field they produce. You want to talk about clean energy! Forget solar cells, forget nuke plants, they are nothing! Space all of a sudden becomes more accessible because the extensive power needed to get there isn't needed anymore. You can float a ship above the ground with a superconducting magnet that repels the magnetic field of the Earth! How cool is that? But the biggest deal with all of this is those gigantic physics experiments with super colliders and particle accelerators. The amount of power needed to run those experiments will be drastically reduced which reduces costs. That means more of those experiments can be run and the more we can learn.

Neato stuff. Even if you don't want to read my post, read the article. Do some research. This is a big deal.

nms

If this is for real they will publish it in a scientific journal. My cynicism tells me it's probably hype, but it'd be great if it wasn't

Jstas

nms wrote: »

If this is for real they will publish it in a scientific journal. My cynicism tells me it's probably hype, but it'd be great if it wasn't

Most scientific journals don't filter up to the common mass media markets because they are incredibly thick and complicated to read. Hence, news articles like the one I posted are what bubbles up. It isn't evidence that there hasn't been a scientific journal article published yet. Then again, the article does state that research is continuing so maybe there isn't enough information verified about the whole deal to publish an article yet.

ryanjoachim

We are probably still a good 50 years or more away from seeing any practical application of this. I would LOVE to see it put to use getting us into space though!

bikezappa

Interesting

But I remember the cold fusion boys when they also published in the news papers first.

Turned out it was all BS.

It's important to have peer review because they are very hard to BS.

Bamadude

I wonder what kind of pressures they are talking about. 2 billion kPa? The required compression has to be reasonable or you can forget everyday applications.

bikezappa

Maybe be they apply pressure to just a small area and put the wire out.

I think this was called autoclaving and is used in industry to make complex thin wire from a large billet of metal.

audiobliss

Wow, that is quite awesome. Hopefully it's true, will lead to more research and experimentation, and eventually to awesome applications in daily life!

wizzy

Okay, when can I get this in a speaker wire ?!?

This is an audio forum after all

Those crazy Saskatchewanese, what will they come up with next?

obieone

I'll believe it when I see them ripping all that fiber-optic out of the ground.

skipf

Oh great, just when the wire wars are dying down, they come up with a whole new kind of wire.