High-temperature Superconductor Spills Secret: A New Phase of Matter | Hacker News Reader

High-temperature Superconductor Spills Secret: A New Phase of Matter

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61 pointsjuiceandjuice16 comments

I'd like to mention that this sort of research at SLAC and other Office of Science facilities and programs in the DOE, is being targeted for heavy cutbacks. A bill passed the house proposing a 20% cut ($1Bn) from the Office of Science budget, but the consensus is that it won't pass the senate or the president.

More extreme examples come from people like Rand Paul who have proposed eliminating the DOE completely.

I agree that this kind of research is needed, but surely you aren't suggesting that the DOE is the only entity capable of investing in research of this kind?

>the DOE is the only entity capable of investing in research of this kind?

who else other than government has this kind of money for such fundamental research? (i.e. a lot of money without any feasible productization in the next at least 10 years) May be IBM Almaden comes closest, and yet it is still very far.

Investments in research which have a time to profitability longer than 20 years, which is the length of the patent term in the US and most of the world, cannot be supplied by for-profit companies. That pretty much leaves government or philanthropic entities. Philanthropic entities do not invest at the level justified by the expected benefit to society of the research. If you want funding at the appropriate level, you need to either do it through the government or you need to modify patent law to enable corporations to capture profits with very large time horizons.

Is there a reason that the DOE is a particularly bad agency, among potential government agencies, for doing this investment?

Wouldn't it be better to fund this through NSF so that it could be part of a cohesive portfolio? Instead of the through the DOE which adds massive beurocratic overhead/duplication of effort. Wouldn't one science funding research body be sufficient?

Also, as for nuclear weapons research wouldn't that be best carried out by the dod, perhaps throug DARPA?

There's a lot of things wrong with what you are assuming, and assuming that the DOE adds massive bureaucratic overhead is a bit naive, frankly.

The NSF doesn't have a physical presence, and given that particle physics is a very natural extension of nuclear physics, that's why the DOE does particle physics (which includes lightsources). DARPA is purposefully limited in scope, they also have very few facilities (really, they are sort of like the NSF for weapons). Nuclear Weapons research is a small (but very important) part of the DOE's mission, but weapons and reactors are so closely tied together that it's really impossible to separate the too. There's certain levels of civilian and military separation that have been put into place by law. Many of the labs do weapons (usually conventional, only two do nuclear) research, many do only science, some do both, some do reactors and some do accelerators. The DOE services everyone though, defense, civilian, academic, everything, and that's largely why they are there and set up the way they are. It sort of ends up being this buffer zone between pure science and defense, and that's generally a good thing I think.

Just to add to what juiceandjuice said: I get the impression you are arguing based off of the names of the various government agencies. This is silly; the names are historical. What's important is whether the agencies are organized properly to bring the people with the correct skills to bear on the particular investment problems. I have zero expertise in how large agencies should be organized, but I can assure you that the DOE has decades of experience funding all sorts of physics research. Moving funding jurisdiction to another agency would be an expensive shift with no obvious benefit.

Let's say IBM wants to build a huge free electron laser, and synchrotron light source, maybe mimic SLAC.

NSLS-II, currently being built at BNL, has a total project cost of $912 million. LCLS, at SLAC, has a total project cost close to $350 million or so, but it's been estimated that they saved several hundred million reusing previous facilities from the linac (plus land) So, $1bn to build, plus operational costs which would be pricy. And you want one of each because a FEL is different than a synchrotron.

Now, for your $2bn+ops costs, you can service maybe 500 experiments a year, maybe a bit more, but less than the demand. At the labs, proposals for experiments that are generally picked are picked based off of merit, usefulness, promise, etc... not necessarily based on who can pay to use the facilities and what sort of profits could be tied to the research. You know... science, often done by tons of professors who get their money from the government as well.

Admittedly, the budget hits probably wouldn't affect the operations of these facilities too much, but they would definitely affect the people who propose to use these facilities. For example, the guys who did this research probably don't get their funding out of the operating costs of the SSRL.

So, yes, the government is the only entity that has invested this kind of money (largely through the DOE) to be able to do this on the scale that they do. I don't see any company picking up the slack anytime soon.

Lists of light sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_synchrotron_radiation_f...

http://sbfel3.ucsb.edu/www/fel_table.html

What's the right way to account for opportunity costs? How do we know that $2 billion spent here is better than investing $100,000 in seed money for 20,000 startups?

If you question the government's ability to decide if it should go to hard science or 20K startups, then how can you trust their ability to choose which 20K startups?

In general, if you don't trust the government's ability to make a decision, then how can you trust their ability to delegate those decisions? This is a decision in and of itself.

Room temperature superconductors are cooler (hah!) than 20,000 social networking photo apps.

So you're saying that social networking is really hot right now? Thanks for the tip! ;-)

As a layman, I've grown to associate "new phase of matter" with concepts that I'll never hear about again. It sounds like "there's a hole here, but we made a cork for it, and guess what, it fits!", aka too much model rearranging.

Said that, I hope they are right this time.

Phases or states of matter at the higher end of physics do not necessarily entirely correspond to the ones you learned in school. For instance, look at this state chart of water, and note how many entries there are: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html

It seems likely to me that this new state would be a subset of what you'd call a "solid", just as you'd call both water II and water III "ice" without worrying about it. You can say the same thing about plasma and how it is a subset of what you would call a gas, if you don't care about the electrical differences.

I believe why they're calling it a "new phase of matter" is because the electron-pairing is remaining at temperatures it is not known to have.

IMO this sounds more like there is a required energy level for electrons to actually be singular in their orbits and that at superconducting temperatures the electrons degenerate into electron-pairs. The structure of the cuperates must increase the energy required for the electrons to sustain being singular.

I don't think it's likely to be a new phase of matter, but rather an exploited special circumstance.

Nice to see some progress coming out of this. Its one of the areas in basic science that can be massively disruptive overall. (probably no need to tell this crowd was room temperature superconductors would change, I know they would sure lower my datacenter cooling bill :-)

I don't doubt for a minute that this is something google.org would fund if the federal gov't money dried up. To much benefit for their business to overlook it.

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