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Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#61

Post by BoneZone »

I worked in Cory Deans lab when he did a brief professorship at City College. He is the most sharply intelligent person I have ever worked with, a savage experimentalist always devising new ways to experiment in nanofabrication and his theoretical curiosity is boundless. Additionally, he’s a really nice Canadian when he goes to the pub!

If you ever wonder why these products using graphene aren’t commercially viable, it is insanely difficult to work with and prepare. Imagine trying to make a sandwich that’s 5x5 microns in area and about 2-3nm thick. Graphene is essentially atomic tissue paper subject to all sorts of contamination and small scale effects.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#62

Post by nick3443 »

jmyeet wrote: post #60
nine_k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

> Transmission lines alone would be huge. Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances. Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't h…

Cheaper batteries meeting the storage requirements for renewables would be a game changer!

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#63

Post by nick3443 »

dtgriscom wrote: post #16
dtquad wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most valuable applications it is also "good enough" to find a superconductor that can be cooled with cheap liquid nitrogen and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity, and thermal stability of a superconductor cooled with expensive liquid helium. Some so-called "high temperature" superconductors begin superconducting at liquid-nitrogen temperature or higher. However in real life applica…

Data point: liquid nitrogen is cheaper than milk.

How can we take advantage of this to reduce my grocery bill? :)

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#64

Post by raelming »

Panzer04 wrote: post #50
dtquad wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most valuable applications it is also "good enough" to find a superconductor that can be cooled with cheap liquid nitrogen and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity, and thermal stability of a superconductor cooled with expensive liquid helium. Some so-called "high temperature" superconductors begin superconducting at liquid-nitrogen temperature or higher. However in real life applica…

For the most valuable applications, sure - but a lot of the biggest historical advances came not from the first application of that new tech, but from that new tech becoming cheap and ubiquitous. Maybe (cheap) room-temp superconductors won't actually be that interesting (maybe it just increases energy transmission efficiency 5-10%), but perhaps it's availability catalises a whole range of new applications that were n…

If room temperature superconductors existed that were practical for transmission scale wires, it would be possible to make a global superconducting electrical grid. The middle East could fill their desert with solar panels and export that electricity to Europe. The sunny side of the planet could export solar power to the nighttime side of the planet. You could make electrical motors out of it a fraction of the size of current motors, like 1000 of horsepower out of a soda can, which would revolutionize the design of pretty much everything in the world with moving parts. Mechanical transmissions would go the way of the vacuum tube. Any vehicle or ship that's not completely electrified would be hybrid electric at least. You could also miniaturize transformers which has a lot more implications for making everything that uses a lot of power to be much more powerful and cheaper.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#65

Post by BurningFrog »

jmyeet wrote: post #60
nine_k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

> Transmission lines alone would be huge. Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances. Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't h…

Maybe superconducting transmission lines need to be underground

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#66

Post by philipkglass »

Ygg2 wrote: post #56
jmward01 wrote: post #2

The great thing about watching advances in superconductors is that any day we could discover the first true practical room temp superconductor and that one day changes the world immensely. I personally think we are likely to find one in the next 5-10 years, but that estimate is based on nothing but hope and optimism on my part.

I don't think we'll really see a superconductor that ticks all the boxes. Reality is too noisy for such effects to take hold. If there was I think evolution would have already used it by now.

Do you mean biological evolution? There are a vast number of useful materials that terrestrial organisms cannot evolve because they're incompatible with the chemical/physical conditions inside living things. Organisms never evolved the use of aluminum structures, for example, even though aluminum has many useful properties and is more terrestrially abundant than carbon.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#67

Post by mensetmanusman »

halflife wrote: post #59
mensetmanusman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are choosing from a subset of materials that can form stable 2D crystals in order to test effects of relative twist angles on their energy bands.

Are 2d crystals the depth of 1 molecule?

One layer of somewhat coplanar atoms.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#68

Post by yencabulator »

popol12 wrote: post #52
nine_k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

How would we cool transmission lines to liquid nitrogen temperature?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gFUwGedayw

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#69

Post by astrange »

nick3443 wrote: post #62
jmyeet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transmission lines alone would be huge. Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances. Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't h…

Cheaper batteries meeting the storage requirements for renewables would be a game changer!

We're getting that.

https://www.caiso.com/documents/2023-special-report-on-batte...

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#70

Post by sheepscreek »

Fascinating stuff. Though it puzzles me that some of these exotic superconductors have been known to us for years yet there’s not been much progress (esp the one with graphene sheets, with a 1 degree tilt). Is that because they are just so hard to synthesize? What would it take to get to the next stage?

I came across another technique discovered many years ago, where they used scotch tape to alter the physical configuration of the material to make it superconduct. At room temperature, I believe.

This all sounds very ground breaking to me, yet we don’t hear about any big co doing any work on them.

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