A Common Semiconductor Just Became a Superconductor
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
Superconducting germanium alloys have been known for decades, I used a Molybdenum/Germanium superconducting alloy in my PhD research 20 years ago, with much higher Tc.
The interesting aspect of this current experiment is the precise alignment of the Ga atoms into specific points of the Ge lattice, so preserving the crystalline structure order which leads to some interesting effects.
Such as?
Though admittedly, I'm not actually aware what parts of a semiconductor circuit are the biggest power dissipation sources, so I guess its entirely possible that most of the power is dissipated across the p-n junctions themselves.
I want to note that in what has become the largest (by mass) application of semiconductors, silicon PV cells, boron has been replaced by gallium as the P type dopant of choice. Boron suffers from an annoying form of light-induced efficiency degradation that gallium avoids.
They mention cryogenic electronics, which are used for high-sensitivity electronics in research labs and in medical tests (eg SQUIDs for magnetoencephalography).
Really? First I've heard of it. And it also doesn't make any sense, since defintionally a material can't be superconducting and semiconducting at the same time, any more than it could be conducting and insulating at the same time. Are they imagining some new kind of thermal-switching circuitry?
This reads to me like the researchers came up with an irrelevant novelty (which is, to be fair, a valid and important part of scientific progress; it still expands our understanding of the universe) and Science Daily asked an LLM to rationalize it as useful.
I'd say it gets interesting if one can get at least part of a die made out of superconductors. Getting power in into the die is a huge damn challenge, we're talking about hundreds of amps for modern CPUs and GPUs - if even a part of that could be shrunk that would be a huge gain.
It feels like the researchers were mainly interested in applicability to Josephson junctions, and the article mixed them up with semiconductor junctions.
An MRI machine is a giant magnet with a closed loop helium cooler to keep the superconducting coils cold. A chiller is used to reject the heat outside.
Seems to me this is a problem.
Unclear to me why that's helpful. Materials that superconduct at a higher temperature than this one aren't hard to come by, or obscure:
> In 1913, lead was found to superconduct at 7 K,
True, but I /can/ see someone, such as Sandia National Labs, very much willing to install a liquid helium cooled computer if it provides a significant performance increase above their existing supercomputer installations.
Was gonna be lazy and say… temp or is doesn't matter.