Room Temperature Superconductors

[K^2]

Haven't done a lot of reading on this yet, but superficially looks legit. Room temperature superconduction, albeit, in a diamond anvil cell.

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-room-temperature-superconducting-material.html

[Entropian]

Looks legit to me.  Diamond anvil cells... isn't graphene supposed to be a room-temperature, standard pressure superconductor?

[NFUN]

I graduated from there this year and I've never heard of that guy. Weird. 

[SOXBLOX]

Now we just need one which can work in 1 atm.

No pressure. 

Edited October 15, 2020 by SOXBLOX

[K^2]

3 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

Now we just need one which can work in 1 atm.

No pressure. 

That would be 0 atm. :p

I'm not feeling like looking for a no-paywall version right now, but their abstract hints at expectations of limited metastability with the right sort of mixture. We're certainly not talking 1atm, but something in a few GPa range could already be handled with a metal shell. You still need to get material to that pressure first, but maybe creating small sealed pellets is viable, which you can already find uses for.

The holy grail, of course, would be figuring out how to make flexible cable out of this stuff. Then you can shape it into whatever shape you need for particular application.

[NFUN]

20 minutes ago, K^2 said:

That would be 0 atm. :p

I'm not feeling like looking for a no-paywall version right now, but their abstract hints at expectations of limited metastability with the right sort of mixture. We're certainly not talking 1atm, but something in a few GPa range could already be handled with a metal shell. You still need to get material to that pressure first, but maybe creating small sealed pellets is viable, which you can already find uses for.

The holy grail, of course, would be figuring out how to make flexible cable out of this stuff. Then you can shape it into whatever shape you need for particular application.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bHel0htRUxVUKDcH9JdWF8BnsH-j37AO/view?usp=sharing

[Gargamel]

https://www.iflscience.com/physics/roomtemperature-superconductivity-has-been-achieved-after-109-years-with-a-catch/

 

[NFUN]

Ah yes. Thank you for giving us an article about the same discovery with less details

[K^2]

@NFUN Thanks for the article link. Looks like they did due diligence on testing, but the bit about metastability is definitely just speculation. I was hoping they'd present some findings that hint at it.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

I'm just excited we finally may have a "Working" example of a Room-Temp Superconductor, even if it turns out that it's not practical for actual use the big hurdle so far is that we've basically been shooting in the dark. We've known certain things undergo a phase transition to Superconductivity at higher temps (Is that the right phrasing?), so the efforts have been mostly focused on combinations of these which sometimes end up duds that only achieve superconductivity at much lower temps than their individual constituents. But the few "High-Temperature" (Which in this context means Liquid Nitrogen, Yikes!) superconductors found have been a result of mixtures, and their success gave us much more insight on the phenomenon as a whole.

So now if we do actually have a working example, and we can start absolutely hammering it with our instruments and finding any potential difference between it and our high-temp Superconductors. That feeds back into the process of iteration, guiding it much, much more precisely. This could be enormous, even though it seems like a complete nothing burger right now.

 

[Gargamel]

7 hours ago, NFUN said:

Ah yes. Thank you for giving us an article about the same discovery with less details

You're very welcome .

[SOXBLOX]

Uhhh, wait. What is this stuff made of? Is it another ceramic?

I haven't read the article.

[Space Nerd]

It contains carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur, so not a ceramic.

(Compressed under a very high pressure)

[K^2]

21 hours ago, Space Nerd said:

It contains carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur, so not a ceramic.

Atomic composition isn't an issue here. Many ceramics are carbides, for example. Definition of ceramic is material made by heat treatment of non-metallic mineral. The synthesis of superconducting material in this article is achieved by combining pure carbon and sulfur. Both of these are minerals. But instead of pressure and heat, pressure and laser are used to fuse the material. I don't know if you would expect to get the same material if you could heat up the diamond cell to high enough temperature. If you would, I'm not sure why you wouldn't call this material a ceramic. But it might be a bit of a stretch to apply definition this way.