A New Family of High-Temperature Superconductors 113
sciencehabit writes to let us know that physicists are hailing the discovery of a new type of superconductor as a "major advance." The new materials could solve the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics — i.e., how and why cuprate superconductors work — as well as paving the way for practical magnetic levitation and lossless transmission of energy. "God only knows where it will go," says one Nobel Laureate. After the discovery of superconductivity in an iron-and-arsenic compound at 26 kelvin, several Chinese research groups quickly found related materials that are superconducting up to 55K. (Cuprates go as high as 138K; liquid nitrogen boils at 77K.)
Re:Close, but no cigar yet. (Score:2, Insightful)
Very Hot! (Score:4, Insightful)
1. "High T_c" is a technical term. Indeed, 55 kelvin is "high" (though not as high as the record for cuprates). You have to compare it with the typical T_c for metals (a few kelvin). The difference is between liquid helium temperatures and liquid nitrogen temperatures (which cuprates have reached already and perhaps the new compounds also will).
2. More improtantly, this will ignite a "firestorm of research". You see, we don't have a good model of high T_c superconductivity (unlike the BCS [wikipedia.org] model for metals). Having several different superconducting systems will help theorists isolate the significant features of the system from the less significant ones.
3. Seeing superconductivity in a totally new material is exciting. This is interesting basic research even if today we dont' have a practical application. If we don't do the research we'll never get to the practical stage.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an entirely new family from the cuprates. The cuprates started much lower too. Also, even if this family never compares to the cuprates in performance, the behavior of this new family could shed light on the (relatively unknown) mechanisms of cuprate superconductivity, allowing for that family to be developed further.
Re:US science is dying? (Score:4, Insightful)
China is mostly a second world country, isn't very poor(the USA is spending trillions there), currently is almost able to duplicate just about every technologically advanced device being built.
there was a chinese company called NEC which duplicated the Real NEC's tv's poorly but close enough to work for several years before they got caught.
While it will be another 5-10 years China is rapidly building up technology, science, and math. They have the manpower power and will, just like japan had 30 years ago. Remember 40 years ago the Japanese only made junk, 20 years later they owned the electronics market, and 10 years after that had some of the best selling cars out there.
Re:US science is dying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Superconducting Supercomputers? (Score:3, Insightful)
We're nowhere near being able to actually heat the planet to any significant degree. Run the computations on how much energy the planet receives from the Sun every day, compare with the total energy generated by humanity in a day.
You don't need to worry about "damaging" the Antarctic by running some computers and dumping the heat out into the local environment. Heat just dissipates, and since it's at a rate proportional to the difference between the temperatures, it goes away faster the more you try. (That's the fundamental reason why we can't directly heat the planet, because even if we did, it would just radiate away.) You need to worry about the stuff that doesn't dissipate.
Re:US science is dying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hanging on to our lead, on the other hand, is doubtful [scidev.net]: "Cited papers first-authored by Chinese scientists -- an important indicator of scientific creativity -- increased by 25.3 per cent in 2006, and the number of times they were cited increased 28.3 per cent. However, China remains thirteenth in terms of total citation numbers." At that rate, China won't be in 13th for long.
From the global perspective it doesn't matter; all this means mankind as a whole is simply progressing much faster now. But from the US nationalist perspective, this definitely decreases our ability to compete for increasingly scarce natural resources. We've already seen this occur drastically in the price of oil.
Re:Hot! (Score:3, Insightful)