Room temperature superconductivity: One step closer to the Holy Grail of physics

I hope superconductivity is mastered in time to solve some of our energy problems. Researchers seem to be rapidly closing in on the secrests of superconductivity. I've read a lot of news stories during the last 1-2 years that detailed some pretty impressive discoveries.

The Singularity cometh...Praise Science!

I second your opinion.
Good article too. I hadn't grasped that by its very nature super conducting cannot be probed at the nano level without destroying or altering it. It's intuitively obvious now I think about it.
Here's another approach; if we had a good micro simulation computer model of the material down to the electon cloud level then surely the process could be observed and analysed 'in silica'. That would be one cool PhD project. Of course it would require vast computational power.

I see that we could have 100% of electricity conducted with superconductors, but what percentage are we at now with today's technology? What percentage is lost now?

serially

Mombo,
According to wikipedia loss was about 7.2% in the USA back in 1995. But it really depends on much and how far in addition to real world conditions.

http://en.wikiped...n#Losses

Thanks Arikin, it was a good question and I had no clue where to find the answer.

I can see how this would open up whole new possibilities in everything from transportation to microchips.

Good article too.

Unfortunatelly it seems, the only new information is the sentence:

"The researchers have discovered where the charge 'hole' carriers that play a significant role in the superconductivity originate within the electronic structure of copper-oxide superconductors".

Such sentence doesn't say very much about progress in understanding.

A superconductor is a conducting dielectric material. Even in the low temperature metals superconduction iniates when a metal-insulator transition occurs by the mechanism that had been proposed by Wigner in 1938: i.e. a Wigner-crystal forms. This stationary array of states superconducts when its electronic-orbitals act as pseudo-particles which can cyclically change positions when allowed to do so by Heisenberg's uncertainty relationship for energy and time. Since during their movement from one position to the next, the kinetic energy is on loan, there is no energy which requires heat-dissipation. Therefore the resistance is zero. These charge-carriers could be bosons but need not be bosons. Cooper-pairs most probably do not exist. Cooper derived them by assuming a metal with a spherical Fermi-surface. These are exactly the metals which do NOT superconduct. Furthermore Cooper-pairs gain kinetic energy which require heat dissipation. In addition a Cooper-pair (with its associated positive phonon charges) moves throufg the metal as a neutral entity. Such an entity cannot be resposnible for charge-transfer. Superconduction within the CuO ceramics occurs between the layers where the required stationary orbitals form from electrons donated by donors within the crystallographic layers. The holes are the positive charges which remain behind within the layers. It is easy to prove that the CuO ceramics have reached their ceiling. To generate superconduction at room temperature an extra aspect needs to be addressed. I hold a patent on this: AND IT WORKS!.

ok cool so whats the patent number so we can have a look

It should be noted that superconducting breaks down when you increase the current (above mA magnitude I recall). So even if they overcome the temperature issue we might still be limitated with the current.
IMHO the 7.2% power distribution loss on wikipedia is suprisingly low. That means what we use today is 92.8% superconducting. The small gain in efficiency would not justify the cost of upgrade even if high temperature high current superconductors become available.

Arikin, thank you for the help!

googleplex, I believe you have something there.
I don't know anything about this but there must be a ton of money being spent on this research just to get back that extra few percent (if that is the correct percentage) that we lose. It doesn't make sense to me either. There must be some other benefits related to achieving superconductivity at room temperature that I just don't know about.

johanfprins said:

I hold a patent on this: AND IT WORKS!.

Sure, yeah.... me too. Why is this place so full of nut-cases?

Yeah, no joke! I would be interested if anyone knows of a good website that keeps an index of pseudoscience and crackpot theories and debunks them. www.junkscience.com does not qualify.

actually the power loss is significant. We currently have situations of power loss so great we switch from AC to DC... We transport the electricity in DC which has a lower loss for specific transport cases (large voltage-long transmission line), and then convert it back in to AC and introduce it to local power grids.

It should be noted that superconducting breaks down when you increase the current (above mA magnitude I recall). So even if they overcome the temperature issue we might still be limitated with the current.
IMHO the 7.2% power distribution loss on wikipedia is suprisingly low. That means what we use today is 92.8% superconducting.

If you want to think of our networks as 92.8% superconducting then remaining 7.2% is not conducting at all...

The small gain in efficiency would not justify the cost of upgrade even if high temperature high current superconductors become available.

The biggest promise is not in large scale power transmission but in new technologies it would allow and huge costs savings in areas where we have to use liquid helium and nitrogen now to achieve superconductivity (like MRI, NMR, particle accelerators, etc).

Superhuman is saying that the current power networks would gain 7.2% in efficiency if superconducting power lines were discovered and we really don't want superconducting lines. Those lines would make it possible to make more use of hydro-power and renewable resources and already existing power plants could supply electricity to distant places that are currently outside the range of current power plants since the transmission efficiency drops to much lower efficiencies. Currently power plants have to be built within 200 miles of their customer's. Nonpolluting sources of electricity could supply more elecricity if superconducting wire becomes available.

Well, it turns out that our Mr. Johan F Prins may not be a "nut-case" after all. Here is an abstract from 2006 that I found online where he discusses his diamond-based ion-injection method for superconductivity. I leave it for those more qualified than I to judge it on its own merits...

full abstract:
arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0607227

Currently power plants have to be built within 200 miles of their customer's. Nonpolluting sources of electricity could supply more elecricity if superconducting wire becomes available.

This is just not true. HVDC lines have losses of about 3% per 1000 km. That's a ~10% loss over 2 000 miles.

It's not that you have to situate plants within 200 miles, it's just that utillities make sane choices. Efficiency isn't the problem, it's cost, security and utillity.

I don't see the cost going down with super-conductors, especially not with fragile ceramic materials.

Being dependent on a huge central transmission line from across the continent is a huge security issue; it can throw half the continent into rolling black-outs for days or weeks due to bad weather or any old fool sabotaging the lines in the middle of nowhere. This is not unfixable; build many independent transmission lines across the continent or build local back-up generation that just sits idle for years at a time until it's needed; both are enormously costly propositions.

It's also quite futile; it doesn't help wind and solar power all that much as the weather is highly correlated across areas that can be a significant portion of an entire continent. You're still going to need obscene quantities of storage and back-up generation(your old friends coal and gas). I don't see how you're ever going to be competitive on cost, safety or CO2 emissions with nuclear power.

Our patent guy REALLY needs to post his own sources if he's going to be making grandiose claims about commonly held beliefs (like the non-existance of cooper pairs). While much of the BCS and related theories don't accuratly predict much of anything in Type II SCs, they are incredibly accurate (at least for relatively simple models) in describing Type I SCs. Cooper pairs (which are paired in reciprocal space, not in "typical" space) are one of the few things that haven't been disproven to exist in Type IIs and more exotic superconductors.

If people are curious about current SC cable projects, see here:http://www.amsc.c...les.html and http://www.superp...php?p=19 (these are the two leading manufacturers of superconducting cable in the world). There are still relatively tiny losses (~1%) associated with these systems as they still need to be cooled.

Soylent, no one is suggesting replacing ALL power lines with one big one. Seriously, where did you get that one from. Redundancy will always be a hallmark of large scale infrastructure. Superconducting lines will be able to help alleviate alot of brownout events because they will allow for other generation facilities in the country to help provide power. Current power generation is only limited to 200-400 miles in the United States (based off of a conversation I've had with DOE officials) due to losses from copper. There is no large scale AC to DC to AC conversion in the US that I have ever heard of. If you could provide information on this (beyond Edison loosing big time on the whole concept), I'd be interested.

Also, googleplex, the superconducting transition is based off of current density. Actually, all materials will eventually break down if you pass too much current through them (though it's usually becuase you heat them up due to internal resistance, which increases with temperature i.e. it will cascade at higher currents. This is contrasted with SCs killing themselves by generating their own internal magnetic field to expel the generated magnetic field from electron movement and therby breaking the cooper pairs, which will coincidentally result in a VERY rapid temperature change afterwards when the SC "quenches" and will often BOIL itself when it goes resistive). I've personally seen (by running the experiment) a 1 um by 100 um cross-section of superconducting film carry 10 Amps of current. To put this in perspective, this correlates to 200 Amps if the 1 um film is 1 cm in width (aka Amps/cm-width). This level is where American Supercondutor was producing 2-3 years ago on the small scale. Now they are producing better than this on larger scales of ~270 A/cm-width at 70 meters of continous length(see http://www.amsc.c...Progress in HTS Coated Conductors and Their Applications Oct 2007.pdf) They are also getting about 380 A/cm-width with 6 m runs.

Honestly, if there was a room temperature superconductor and it wasn't cost prohibitive or an environmental nightmare, they would use it regardless of how "good" of a superconductor it was.

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I am sorry I am only responding now: But I have been away for a while. I agree that you must find my claims incredible; but they are correct. My patent is not yet in the public domain. Recent results published in Science vol. 319 (2008) 1509-1512, prove that Cooper-pairs cannot model superconduction. My model explains these results in detail. I am writing up a manuscript at the moment. The incontrovertible fact is that any charge-carrier which can be accelerated cannot convey a super-current. This is so since the increase in kinetic energy must then be heat-dissipated. Cooper-pairs are modelled to be able to break-up when they are accelerated. Therefore they cannot be responsible for superconduction QED. Superconduction requires energy to drive a current but this energy must not be heat-dissiapted. This can only happen when the energy is borrowed under the rule of Heisenberg's uncertainty relationship for energy and time.

From AWT perspective, the highly compressed repulsing particles (i.e. the electrons) are exhibiting tendency to form a flat density fluctutation, similar to flat membranes, which are forming inside of condensing supercritical fluid. The electrons are moving in ordered transversal waves along surfaces of these density fluctuations, i.e. like bosons without friction and dispersion.
http://superstrun...part.gif
The formation of such zones is promoted by decreasing of temperature at the places, where the electrons are packed more closely, i.e. at the places of holes, where positivelly charged atoms are collecting the electrons from their neighourhood.

Briefly speaking, the holes are promoting a formation of isolated droplets of layered electron liquid with superfluous properties at low temperatures. The spin of these isolated droplets remains entangled (i.e. unique for most of electrons in the droplet) and as such it can be switched by using of weak external magnetic field as a whole, which enables the potential usage in spinotronic circuits.

The whole trick in HT superconductor preparation is to achieve the less or more continuous phase of highly compressed electrons throughout the whole lattice. You can think, we are trying to prepare a foamy phase of highly compressed electron fluid arranged into mesh of "pipes", which penetrates the whole crystal like neural net.

It's evident, the simple injection of large amount of randomly distributed holes isn't sufficient for such purpose, the structure matrix of HT superconductor must be specially adopted to such solution. The layered structure of YBaCuO cuprates enables to achieve this trick: you can think, it's penetrated by ordered lines of holes (formed by replacing an La3 atoms by Sr2 atoms), where the electrons are highly packed into the form of continuous superconductive "pipes", through which they can propagate in transversal waves. The strong repulsive forces between electrons must be compensated by strongly attractive forces between highly oxidized atoms in neighboring layers, so that just a tiny volume fraction of superconductive phase can be formed in such matrix. This limits the critical current density of HT superconductors.