Second Family of High-Temperature Superconductors Discovered

[rayofreason]

Researchers in Japan and China have discovered a new family of high-temperature superconductors--materials that conduct electricity without any resistance at inexplicably high temperatures. Physicists around the world are hailing the discovery of the new iron-and-arsenic compounds as a major advance, as the only other high-temperature superconductors are the copper-and-oxygen compounds, or cuprates, that were discovered in 1986. Those older materials netted a Nobel and ignited a firestorm of research, but physicists still don't agree about how they work, leaving high-temperature superconductivity the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics. Some researchers hope the new materials will help solve it.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/417/1

[RC]

1. FYI - 55° K =-360.67 Fahrenheit °F

52° K = -366.07 Fahrenheit °F

[On the Road]

2. Is That Warm Enough

for there to be viable commercial applications?

[edhopper]

3. Not sure

it has to do with if you can use liquid hydrogen or helium as a coolant. But sounds like a breakthrough to me.

[Indenturedebtor]

4. In Space?

"However, if you put a physical object into space, it will reach a
temperature that depends on how efficiently it absorbs and emits
radiation and on what heating sources are nearby. For example, an
object that both absorbs and emits perfectly, put at the Earth's
distance from the Sun, will reach a temperature of about 280 K or 7 C.
If it is shielded from the Sun but exposed to interplanetary and
interstellar radiation, it reaches about 5 K. If it were far from all
stars and galaxies, it would come into equilibrium with the microwave
background at about 2.7 K."

From - http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part4/section-14.html

:shrug:

[On the Road]

5. Now THAT I Hadn't Thought About --

Giant orbiting super-processors using superconductors? No reason it couldn't work. Payload is small. Bandwidth is cheap. Space just does the cooling.

[caraher]

6. What do you want to do with the superconductor?

While making a sunshade probably would create a region that's fairly "cold," if you want to much more than just have a chunk of superconducting material you need to think about what else goes into the device you want to build. Chances are you'll have at least something that will heat up...

Space is in some ways kind of a lousy place to do anything that relies on maintaining specific temperatures. A big part of payload planning on the Shuttle is working out which things in the cargo bay "see" others and figuring how that thermal radiation will affect their performance. And one of the biggest hassles is getting rid of waste heat. That's one reason that you'll almost always see the cargo bay doors open on the Shuttle while it's in orbit - it relies on radiators that open with the doors to keep things at a manageable temperature. If the doors won't open the mission has to be aborted.

Check out a NASA web page on this. The article also suggests that, at least in near-earth orbit, it's hard to get cold enough for this application ("-157 degrees C"). That's 116 K.

[On the Road]

7. Makes Perfect Sense

but I never thought of the heat-transfer problem in space. Just responding to the previous poster's observation.

Does that mean the breakthrough is useful only as a stepping stone to higher-termperature superconductors?

[Indenturedebtor]

8. Would that work the same on the dark side of the moon?

I'm not too familiar with the thermodynamics of space.. does most of the heat come from the sun? Could we use these on the moon?