Since their discovery in late 1980s, superconductors were thought to revolutionize everything that had an electric current flowing, but allowing it to pass through more easily, and with much less heat produced. Ultra-efficient magnetic trains had been envisioned, then, but still haven’t been invented, because high-temperature ceramic superconductor have an issue with big currents.
Peter Hirschfeld, a professor of physics at the University of Florida, helped by five other colleagues, released a paper in which he explains why the atomic-level structural elements of high-temperature ceramic superconductors impede high currents. Their explanation for how “grain boundaries” separating rows of atoms within superconductors impede current is the first to fit a phenomenon that has helped keep the superconductors from reaching their vaunted potential – and puzzled experimental physicists for more than two decades.
Ceramic superconductors are made of rows of atoms arranged slightly askew to each other, with an imperfect vertical and horizontal alignments. Areas of electrical charge build up at the angles where the lines formed by the atoms meet, and act like dams, counteracting with the electronic flow.
The mathematical model Hirschfeld and his colleagues built fits these observations “very nicely”. “We abstracted a very theoretical model of a single boundary” that can be applied to all such boundaries, he said.
The hope of circulating high currents through superconductors is not lost, though, and is far from being a pipe dream. Hirschfeld says that his theory will give a better insight to experimental scientists, who could, over time, develop high temperature superconductors with more permissive grain boundaries.
Liked it? Share onFacebook and Google +1:
| |  See it here! |  E-mail Updates |  |
| Also share story on: | Become our facebook fan |
Read next:
Room Temperature Superconductors: a Step AwayImagine your television set working for 0.0001Watt, or your electric car charged by the Sun as you go. Imagine almost never ending batteries powering cool engines, no power lost through heat.
New Iron-Based Material Could Be The Best High Temperature SuperconductorFollowing the dream of realizing a high-temperature superconductor, Cornell University researchers just found something about iron-based materials: they can be made to resemble electronic liquid crystals.
New Research Showing Fabrication Pattern for Higher-Temperature SuperconductorsResearchers from Princeton University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan, using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, have discovered how in a superconducting material, at a nano-scale level, regions with stronger superconductivity helped regions with weaker superconductivity survive when exposed to higher temperature.
New Discovery Sheds Light on Way to High Temperature SuperconductivityHigh temperature superconductors are today what some other time the philosopher’s stone used to be. Research done by Gennady Logvenov and his colleagues from the Brookehaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY sheds a new light on how scientists could engineer materials to obtain their desiderate: room temperature superconductors.
Germanium Hydride to Become High Temperature Viable SuperconductorThe evolution of energy storage is not enough if we don’t also evolve the energy transportation methods. That’s why superconductors are not only good for us, but are also necessary in some applications where heat and energy loss, in general, have no place.
Comments from our readers
3167 total comments so far. What's your opinion ?- No comments on this article yet.
