Free Republic

In a potentially landmark development in the world of superconductor research, scientists at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology have claimed to achieve the first successful replication of the superconducting material LK-99. The announcement came through a video shared five hours ago, that showcases a small flake of their sample reacting to an external magnetic field. This news has sent ripples through the scientific community and industries that stand to be transformed by breakthroughs in superconductivity. As Andrew Cote, a Stellarator Engineer known for his lucid explanations of complex physical phenomena on Twitter (@Andercot), often reminds his followers, room-temperature...

A team of researchers claims to have created the first materials that conduct electricity perfectly at room temperature and ambient pressure, but many physicists are highly sceptical. Speaking to New Scientist, Hyun-Tak Kim at the College of William & Mary in Virginia says he will support anyone trying to replicate his team’s work. Superconductors are materials through which electricity can move without encountering any resistance, and so would significantly cut down the energy costs of electronics. But for over a century, researchers have been unable to make them work except under extreme conditions like very low temperatures and remarkably high...

Scientists at the University of Rochester reported this week that they have taken a big leap toward creating a commercially viable superconductor that operates at room temperature and a low enough level of high pressure to be used in almost any technology that uses electric energy.

Thanks to Red Badger. Graphene is a strange material. Understanding its properties is both a fundamental question of science and a promising avenue for new technologies. A team of researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and the Weizmann Institute of Science has studied what happens when they layer four sheets of it on top of each other and how this can lead to new forms of exotic superconductivity. “Multilayered graphene has many promising qualities, ranging from widely tunable band structure and special optical properties to new forms of superconductivity—meaning being able to conduct electrical current without...

Associate professor Mazhar Ali and his research group at TU Delft have discovered one-way superconductivity without magnetic fields, something that was thought to be impossible ever since its discovery in 1911 – up till now. The discovery, published in Nature, makes use of 2D quantum materials and paves the way towards superconducting computing. Superconductors can make electronics hundreds of times faster, all with zero energy loss. Ali: “If the 20th century was the century of semi-conductors, the 21st can become the century of the superconductor.” During the 20th century many scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, have puzzled over the nature...

Superconductors are highly desirable, especially when it comes to reducing energy consumption. They show quantum properties on the scale of ordinary items. This makes them exciting candidates for building computers that use quantum physics. However, qubits, the elementary units of quantum computers, are extremely sensitive. When contact electromagnetic fields, heat, and collisions with air molecules, qubits lose their quantum properties. The addition of more resilient qubits using topological superconductors can protect qubits from losing their properties. In a new study, scientists led by Kent and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have reported about the discovery of a new rare topological...

In this video I use a type II superconductor to perform a quantum locking demonstration using YCBO (Yttrium barium copper oxide). I then explain in depth how superconductors and quantum locking (Flux pinning) works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY4m022tgo&t=370s

Physicists have known since 1911 that electricity can flow without resistance in materials called superconductors. And in 1957, they figured out why: Under specific conditions, including typically very cold temperatures, electrons join together in pairs—something that's normally forbidden due to their mutual repulsion—and as pairs, they can flow freely. Electron pairs are named for Leon Cooper, the physicist who first described them. In addition to explaining classical superconductivity, physicists believe Cooper pairs bring about high-temperature superconductivity, an unconventional variant discovered in the 1980s. It was dubbed "high-temperature" because it occurs at temperatures that, although still very cold, are considerably higher...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have joined with researchers at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mount a three-pronged attack on one of the most obstinate puzzles in materials sciences: what is the pseudogap?A collaboration organized by Zhi-Xun Shen, a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) at SLAC and a professor of physics at Stanford University, used three complementary experimental approaches to investigate a single material, the high-temperature superconductor Pb-Bi2201 (lead bismuth strontium lanthanum copper-oxide)....

Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a new class of materials which have previously only existed in science fiction films and books. A team of British and Russian scientists led by Professor Geim have discovered a whole family of previously unknown materials, which are one atom thick and exhibit properties which scientists had never thought possible. Not only are they ultra-thin, but depending on circumstances they can also be ultra-strong, highly-insulating or highly-conductive, offering a wide range of unique properties for space-age engineers and designers to choose from. Professor Andre Geim said: "This discovery opens up practically infinite...

And it could be the key to understanding one of the biggest mysteries in physics today - high-temperature superconductors.An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of a new state of matter in a material that appears to be an insulator, superconductor, metal and magnet all rolled into one, saying that it could lead to the development of more effective high-temperature superconductors. Why is this so exciting? Well, if these properties are confirmed, this new state of matter will allow scientists to better understand why some materials have the potential to achieve superconductivity at a relativity high critical temperature...

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

The atom-thick sheet of carbon, graphene already has a number of amazing properties to it, including strength and electrical conductivity. As impressive its conductivity is though, superconductivity is still greater and has been observed with graphene, but not explained. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have now found how graphene and calcium become a superconductor.Called calcium intercalated graphite, or CaC6 is produced by interweaving calcium and graphite, which is a means of isolating sheets of graphene. About ten years ago it was discovered that this material could become superconducting, but neither the exact means nor...

Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University are making a bold claim: an entirely new state of matter. The team, led by Kosmas Prassides, says they've created what's called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting rubidium, a strange alkali metal element, into buckyballs, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape from a series of interlocking polygons (think of the Epcot Center, but in microscopic size.) Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities. Here, while combining buckyballs and rubidium, the researchers created a...

Surprising discovery may offer clues to emergence of high-temperature superconductivityUPTON, NY — Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a “quantum spin liquid” — a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of...

The 2011 Cold Fusion/Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions Colloquium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Part 2 (Report prepared by staff of JET Energy, Inc.) INFINITE ENERGY • ISSUE 99 • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 The 2011 Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions/Cold Fusion Colloquium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) was held on Saturday, June 11 and Sunday, June 12, 2011. The meeting focused on the science and technology of cold fusion (CF) and lattice-assisted nuclear reactions (LANR). In 1989, the initial failures of cold fusion resulted from bad experiments, bad paradigm, materials issues, poor loadings and a poor appreciation of the...

MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report Compiled and written by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D. MIT Class of 1969, S.B. Aero/Astro Eng., 1970 S.M. Aero/Astro Eng. Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine President, New Energy Foundation, Inc. Introduction When on March 23, 1989 Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had measured nuclear-scale excess energy from a palladium-heavy water electrochemical cell, and that they had also detected some preliminary evidence of nuclear signatures from their exotic energy-producing reactions, the world was in awe. Their famous afternoon press conference at the University of Utah, coming less than twelve hours before the...

Password guessing The U.S. intelligence community has launched a multi-year research project to develop a superconducting computer, awarding its first contracts to three major technology companies.IBM, Raytheon BBN and Northrop Grumman won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.If it works, the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program could lead to a new generation of superconducting supercomputers."The energy demands of today's high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address," IARPA said in a statement. Such computers use massive amounts of energy.Competition from Europe, Japan...

Got mass? Scientists observe electrons become both heavy and speedy Electrons moving in certain solids can behave as if they are a thousand times more massive than free electrons, but at the same time act as superconductors. A new study led by Princeton scientists shows that this happens because of a process known as quantum entanglement that determines the mass of electrons moving in a crystal. The discovery can help improve understanding of how certain materials become superconducting, which may have applications in areas such as power network efficiency and computing speed. Credit: the Yazdani Group A Princeton University-led team...

This could change everything you know about electrical power or computers.