From the Milken Institute Review, March 22:
Some technologies take so long to deliver on their potential that they turn into punchlines, with every nanometer of alleged progress greeted with suspicion if not derision. So it has been with superconductors, materials that allow electricity to flow without resistance. Maybe it’s time to get ready, though, for a serendipity: Research just published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, by Ranga P. Dias and colleagues at the University of Rochester, reports on a new metal that is superconductive at near-ambient temperature.
First, a soupçon of science for the humanists in the audience. In physics, a conductor is a material (most commonly a metal such as copper, silver or gold) that allows the flow of electrical current. In contrast, an insulator is a material that restricts the flow — think glass and numerous sorts of plastics. Semiconductors combine the characteristics of both conductors and insulators: their resistance can be varied, allowing them to function as electrical valves. Silicon compounds (as in the eponymous Valley) are the most common semiconductors, followed by gallium arsenide.As electrons move through a conductor, some collide with atoms, other electrons and impurities in the medium, and these collisions create heat, draining away the amount of electrical energy that emerges. Even the best conductors were long thought to have some resistance — which is why circuit breakers are needed to prevent your house wiring from starting fires when you turn on umpteen appliances. But in 1911 the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes found that the resistance in mercury completely vanished when it was cooled to the temperature of liquid helium (-452° Fahrenheit, only a few degrees above absolute zero).
Early on, scientists could explain what occurred in superconductivity, but the why and how remained a mystery for nearly a half century. It was only in 1957 that three American researchers — John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer — established the microscopic theory of superconductivity, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. Then, in 1986, scientists discovered a new class of copper-oxide materials that exhibited superconductivity, some of them at above the temperature at which nitrogen becomes a liquid (-321° Fahrenheit).
Needless to say, that is still extremely cold. But super-conduction is such a valuable property that despite the energy requirements of reaching and sustaining the necessary conditions, “high-temperature” superconductors had global sales of $6.5 billion in 2022....
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