Future Room Temperature Super Conductors

This article was linked in an ER patient thread in the Conspiracy forum but certainly deserves a thread here.

Source

In an article published today in the journal Nature, the team, led by Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, offers insights into why the characteristics of a new family of iron-based superconductors reveal the need for fresh theoretical models which could, they say, pave the way for the development of superconductors that can operate at room temperature.

I wonder if they can do it?

Exciting stuff but I don't think there was any room temperature superconductivity in evidence. Do you have any data on the maximum allowable temperature for these iron compund-based superconductors?

It only makes sense because of iron's natural affinity toward magnetism.
Chances are they'll probably use it in some sort of metamaterial to achieve the effect they're going for.

More curiousness as to why they haven't approached this a long time ago.

reply to post by Heronumber0


I can't get access to the paper because I don't have a subscription to Nature. Also I don't think it is in the current issue, but the next. Might try and get the issue with the paper in it.

What I found interesting was the inferrence that they have found something that disagrees with all the previous theories on super conductors, and presumably with the way electrons behave in certain substances.

To the researchers' surprise, their results were incompatible with some of the newly proposed theories in this mushrooming field.

"In the face of this discovery, it is clear that we need to reexamine the old and invent some new theoretical models," Tesanovic said. "I predict that these new, iron-based superconductors will keep us physicists busy for a long, long while."

I found a new article on this topic of iron super conductors here.

It goes further into the new superconductors made with iron and found that they are immune to the destructive effects of magnetism on previous superconductors.

The researchers put the new superconductors to the test, placing them within Oak Ridge National Laboratory's 45-tesla Hybrid magnet, one of the most powerful research magnets in existence. Researchers expected the magnet to be sufficient to kill the superconductor, but to their surprise it tolerated it and was healthily superconducting even at the magnetic field's full power.

In addition it goes into the theory behind it and how it has changed the way they are approaching super conductivity.

On a technical side the research yields an even greater mystery, perhaps indicating that we know less about superconduction than we think we do. Superconduction on an atomic level has long been though to occur through so-called "Cooper pairs", paired electrons with opposite spin, momentum, etc. Magnetism was thought to break these pairs. Either iron has some sort of unique way of keeping the pairs bonded, or the current model is incomplete or flawed.