

High temperature superconductor created - TrevorJ
http://www.superconductors.org/254K.htm

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swombat
That's extremely interesting, though the "article" doesn't do a great job of
presenting it to people who don't already know it.

The reason high-temperature superconductors are important is because they
allow very strong magnetic fields, such as the kind used in MRI scanners in
hospitals. Currently those need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, which is
obviously very expensive. At the temperatures described in this article, you
could have a a superconductor cooled by a simple freezer unit. This is a lot
cheaper and would make MRI much more accessible.

And then, of course, there's a dozen other applications of strong magnetic
fields that we don't know about because it's too expensive.

And then, to add onto that, if we can manufacture circuits out of
superconductors, we may well find increased efficiencies in running a
computer. Superconductors have zero resistance and so they don't heat up when
current goes through them. They require less current and less cooling than
normal systems. I'm sure Google is looking into ways to use this sort of thing
for their data centres.

~~~
DaniFong
As I understand it, for MRI (and other devices which need high fields, such as
magnetic confinement fusion), the biggest limiting factor is not cooling,
which is not terribly expensive relative to the cost of all the other
equipment (liquid nitrogen is actually cheaper than milk), but the so called
critical magnetic field strength, at which the material no longer can maintain
its superconductivity. There's been similar progress along these lines as
well, but it is not as glamorous -- as the critical field increases, so too
may your magnetic fields.

By contrast, room temperature superconductors, if they're cheap enough, are
_way_ better than even slightly lower Tc superconductors, because they can be
used in situations where cooling would induce a prohibitive efficiency loss
and expense. Hence the glamor. :-) It could revolutionize instrumentation,
power transmission, generator, transformers, power quality, signal
transmission, on and on and on... :-)

~~~
TrevorJ
Didn't the critical field issues lie at the root of some of the problems that
the LHC has been facing? I seem to remember reading that someplace.

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kniwor
This got posted to slashdot and from the discussion there, it appears likely
that this is not true.

[http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=...](http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=29725537)

[http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=...](http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1401739&cid=29727119)

We had a similar incident with the kids who had a hair solar panel. Not
knowing much about superconductors, I had no idea what to look for. This being
HN, I somehow expected the submitter to be knowledgeable enough.

Can we have some submitter guidelines for preventing people from posting such
stuff. Digg and reddit fail pretty regularly at preventing this and it would
be great if HN could dodge this bullet.

~~~
TrevorJ
Guidelines exist and can be viewed here:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I felt that the veracity of the claim itself would be an interesting
discussion on HN. It's been talked about on other sites but we tend to have
more informative and knowledgeable discussion here than happens elsewhere so I
felt that it was worth posting if only to be able to discuss the deeper
implications and the nuances of why, specifically something like this may in
fact be impossible as claimed.

As the guidelines say: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer
might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

There are also some guidelines about the appropriate way to handle submissions
that are off-topic which might be helpful to you.

~~~
kniwor
Fair enough. I guess I will just have to learn to take HN articles on science
with much much bigger grains of salt.

~~~
TrevorJ
I probably should have labeled it to make it clear that I was interested in a
skeptical discussion of the claim.

