Viable superconducting material created in Rochester lab
rochester.edu
rochester.edu
Good article that contextualises the results and concerns about the lab that published these results.
Maybe mobile browsers consider any scrolling as an interaction or something?
What are the immediate applications for such a thing? I can trivially imagine long distance electrical cables, but HVDC is already pretty efficient. Would maglev applications suddenly become more widespread? Anything involving magnets (MRI, NMR) could maybe gain resolution? Are there revolutionary applications just waiting for this material?
Not at all to be dismissive, but I am genuinely curious what opportunities this could create.
You can't spell cryogenics without "cry", and being able to sustain a large field without needing cryocoolers or a wet system would lead to impossible-to-imagine gains. Medical/industrial imaging, maglev (for sure), even fundamental physics would hugely benefit from the tech.
There are other effects at higher fields that are not necessarily positive, so just cranking up the field has limits. But in general higher fields provide more resolution and sensitivity in NMR, and it's quite a big increase.
Also, the new Bruker systems run at 28.2 T, which is a mind-bogglingly large field. This badly structured headline made got a real double take out of me too: https://www.bruker.com/en/news-and-events/news/2022/bruker-a...
3GHz is a lot
But if one could build indeed a global lossless energy grid, than this would mean solar power for everyone all the time, as somewhere on the planet, the sun is always shining.
My default number for HVDC is 5%/1000km, but I think that's out of date now; at that level, antipodal power would be 1-(0.95^20) = 64% loss, and while that's certainly something I'd avoid if possible, it's still good enough to make PV beat the TCO of batteries or fossil fuels or nuclear… if you ignore the TCO of installing and maintaining the cable, geopolitics, and all the other reasons we've not done that yet.
(I have no idea what the TCO of undersea HVDC cables is).
https://balticwind.eu/higher-cost-and-potential-delay-for-su...
That being said the Baltic sea is shallow, averaging less than 50m in that area.
The next one would be as thin films to replace copper or aluminium power delivery wires in silicon chips. This would make them run significantly cooler. While copper is a good conductor, very thin copper wires transferring multiple amps(!) is a recipe for a space heater. Even a superconductor that cost $1K per gram would be worthwhile in this application, let alone $1K per kilogram!
Next up would likely be electrical motors. Higher magnetic field strengths and lower heating losses would allow some really tiny but crazy powerful motors.
I don't think this is still correct. Mass production of REBCO has ramped up in the past few years which is capable of 250 T internal fields and is being sold on tapes with 100,000+ A/cm^2. We're currently at the "hundreds of miles of tape per year" stage.
While HTS magnets may be "state of the art" they are still substantially more expensive than LTS magnets and it will be a few years before they start showing up in MRI machines.
I mean "long" in a somewhat relative sense because at tens of gigahertz your signal integrity goes to garbage after several inches, but also I found a paper talking about fractions of a decibel per kilometer if you completely isolate the wire.
When you're working with a copper conductor, the thinner the wire, the higher the resistance, and you trade off turns for conductance (1/resistance).
Thus, a superconductor offers the ability to put many more turns, or much higher current, into a given volume.
You're limited with steel cores as to the maximum magnetic flux, but you could get the same flux with much lower power levels using superconducting coils. Alternatively, you could redesign your motor or actuator to be a coreless design, and you can then use much, much higher magnetic fields (up to the critical field of the superconductor).
A superconductor can handle much larger amounts of current than copper, and maybe also generate a higher magnetic field in the rotor, so you could get much higher torques directly from the motor.
Superconductors still aren't ideal -- they stop being super in really high magnetic fields, perhaps because the electrons are moving in curves rather than straight and the complicated quantum effect that causes superconductivity doesn't work. But plausible superconductors could give great results.
That depends, because you've under-specified it. Critical magnetic field and critical current density at the very least, probably also fragility on more than one axis.
Let's say it's got "enough" strength and critical magnetic field, and a density of 5 so that's $5000/litre. At a critical current of 1A/cm^2, fairly useless. At 10,000A/cm^2 that can make some neat medical equipment that no longer needs coolant that condenses the oxygen out of the air if it leaks.
It's been a while since I read about the idea — and this might have been an amateur blog rather than a serious claim — but I think 100,000A/cm^2 for reasonable density is enough to fly by pushing against earth's magnetic field?
A bit of an understatement. It could be possible to fly like helicopters, but all the way into lower space, reach an orbit, stop again, go for another one, etc.
You could build electric motors without loss.
You could fill the Tevatron tunnel at Fermilab with new magnets and use it as either an accelerator, or an energy storage facility, depending on the time of day and demand.
I'd make a wedding ring out of it, and be able to feel magnetic fields.
I'd make a SQUID with it, and experiment with the |A| field (electromagnetic vector potential).
What about biohacking? Imagine those little magnets that people like to implant below their fingertips—would a superconductor be especially cool to have there?
Ultrasensitive low cost magnetometers could usher in a wave of low cost MRIs. The burden would shift from exotic hardware and power electronics to signal processing and computational reconstruction, which scales great.
In a nutshell: a previous close-to-room-temp superconduction article from this group was retracted from Nature due to two main concerns; (1) a diagram of a measurement needed to confirm superconductivity seemed a lot like one from a 2009 paper, (2) no one else was able to create this material. Oh and that measurement in the 2009 paper was done by the same scientist as the measurement in the retracted paper - and is the source of why the 2009 paper is also under suspicion.
Moreover, it turns out the principal investigator's doctoral thesis has copied substantially from another thesis without proper attribution.
So it seems many are taking a "let's wait and see" approach.
We worked with a high temperature (i.e. liquid nitrogen [1]) ambient pressure superconductor. The experiment was quite unimpressive. You put the small block inside liquid nitrogen, with enough wires [2] and a thermocouple to measure the temperature, and connect it to an oscilloscope. You watch how the temperature decrees in the thermocouple and hope the drawing in the oscilloscope does something weird. There is a lot of room to connect the wires to another device [3], or just show fake data in the oscilloscope. [4]
[1] "high temperature" means more than −195.8 °C = −320 °F = 77 K, that is quite cold for most people
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing
[3] For example, in the OP, they can have a fake ambient temperature superconductor, and connect that cables to a real liquid nitrogen temperature superconductor that is in another room and is put inside and outside the nitrogen by a hidden person.
[4] We had some problems with our superconductor, and we wanted to repeat some measurements. It was sensitive to humidity, and it worked quite well until another student wanted have another stable temperature to compare, and put it in water with ice :( .
See also: Professional illusionists.
This would make me feel very confident.
If I was to make such a discovery I'd be hell-bent to have other labs reproduce it independently as fast as possible, as that would, with very high likelihood, earn me a Nobel prize. Not releasing any information about my wonder material because I might want to get a patent on it (which they probably already filed before publishing results anyway) seems just weird.
In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.
20 ℃ and 10 kilobars pressure.
The temp, I like. the pressure, I don't see how this is practical in engineering deployment. I'd trade some of that heat to get less pressure at this point, contrary to normal "warmer is better" -so what reduction in pressure for what degrees C of cooler temp?
(not an engineer or materials physics person)
ChatGPT says Titanium, Tungsten, and Stainless Steel can handle above 10k. Even carbon fiber can. Imagine a tiny resistor-like component where inside is pressurized superconductor. Like a tiny capacitor.
Do you complain about angstroms?