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Joe Eck's Superconductors.org is reporting the discovery of the 25th and 26th high-temperature superconductors. Sn9SbTe4Ba2MnCu15O30+ displays a critical transition temperature (Tc) near 136°C (276°F) and Sn10SbTe4Ba2MnCu16O32+ transitions near 141°C (285°F).
To grasp how exceptionally high these temperatures are, consider that 141 Celsius is warmer than the melting points of more than 45 different solder alloys.
These two new formulations resulted from expanding the unit cell of the 129C superconductor announced in March 2015. One extra Sn-Cu-O2 layer was added to reach 136C and two extra Sn-Cu-O2 layers were added to reach 141C.
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"Hot" New Superconductors Discovered
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:14AM
Looking at the charts he's posted, this uneducated eye sees a discontinuity in the resistance curve at those transition points. But, there is still plenty of resistance. That makes me think these are not super-conductors in the way most people think of the term -- effectively zero resistance.
Experts?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:17AM
Looking at the Wikipedia talk page for Room-temperature superconductors, it seems like superconductors.org is a known crank/fraud site.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:45AM
Dunno about fraud, didn't see em selling anything so hard to see who would be defrauded. Now as to crank? Oh yea. It gives it off in visible waves of zaniness from the page layout to the obviously fake endorsements.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday June 10 2015, @05:44AM
Kinda looks like the superconductor version of a Perendev magnet motor, no?
That kind of stuff eggs on some people to make illusory videos to give hope the thing actually works, leading others to spend a lot of time pursuing futility.
Meanwhile, the author of the illusory video is hoping someone out there will give him big bucks for "patent rights" for his illusion. You already see these videos all over YouTube for overunity machines.
The illusionists plead "Fund me to build one for You!". You know as well as I what will happen next.
Mr. Moneybags gives Mr. Illusionist a good life in exchange for promises. This goes on as long as Mr. Moneybags keeps writing checks. He will keep receiving promises and "almost there". Until Mr. Moneybags gives up, highly frustrated, and by this time, the illusionist has enjoyed several good years at Mr. Moneybag's expense.
I know if I ever got one to actually work, the first thing I would probably do is replicate operating "toys" that demonstrate the principle and sell them through WalMart. One could no more patent that concept than try to patent fire.
A mass release would just make sure the cat is out of the bag big-time, and he's not going back in.
I have been taken in by several clever illusionists and spent several days building prototypes that never had a chance of working. My theoretical education told me all along it was futile to build it, but the salesmanship and "being closed-minded" taunts by the presenter egged on a lot of misallocation of my resources.
I have been quite intrigued with superconductivity, as I am puzzled as to why it happens at all. If this phenomena could be understood to a point we can fabricate high temperature devices, this will open up all sorts of possibilities for things beyond our wildest imaginings. I, for one, envision very powerful bidirectional motor/generator and capacitor units for cars to be used in such a fashion that every joule used goes to overcome air resistance... with absolutely no penalty for accelerating/braking. The car's energy would freely flow back and forth between kinetic and potential energy as seamlessly as watching a pendulum.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:11AM
Funny enough, here's a quote from superconductivity.org/Links.htm:
Note: The link for Elsevier Science/Physica C has been removed. Elsevier Publishing has facilitated the theft of intellectual property belonging to Superconductors.ORG. And, despite repeated requests, refuses to redress the problem. Elsevier Science/Physica C is NOT a trustworthy source of superconductor information.
Also, this is bullshit: http://www.superconductors.org/woman.htm [superconductors.org].
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 10 2015, @05:32PM
No, that is merely a joke older than me and from your attitude, certainly older than you.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:30AM
Also, the charts show resistance increasing as temperature decreases. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
I'm not an expert, but it definitely looks like bullshit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pherenikos on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:45AM
This sort of discontinuity is often seen in resistance vs temperature measurements if the experimentalist isn't being careful. Claims of superconductivity need two important proofs, zero resistance and the Meissner effect (the expulsion of a magnetic field on cooling through the transition). Furthermore the volumetric fraction of your sample which is superconducting needs to be relatively large >5-10% if you want to trust your data. My professional opinion is that this is an experimental artifact.
A simple critique of the data presented in TFA, shows that it the "signal" is barely above the noise floor of the measurement, and is not reproducible between different plots shown. Were this real, a more productive avenue of exploration would be to increase the superconducting fraction to verify the claim rather than repeatedly changing chemical compounds as this individual has done. Note that in the realm of superconductivity an increase of 40K in highest superconducting transition temperature would revolutionize the field and award the discoverer a Nobel Prize.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:35PM
and the Meissner effect
Type-II don't require that, not completely. And once that floodgate opens, you can see where it leads to "well, there's a weird discontinuity so I'm onto something"
There are a couple conceptual problems with the whole discussion. In this article, here on SN in all science articles, and in general "out in the world"
The superconductors.org site is like an online research notebook full of wild and sometimes fruitful speculation. It infuriates people who want to be preached the agreed upon truth to, but this is what real science looks like, semi-organized semi-directed Fing around in the dark to see what happens. Meanwhile you've got people complaining the online research notebook isn't quite as cut and dried and formal as a published paper in Nature. Well, uh, yeah, thats kind of the point. You asked for the whole world to be connected on the internet and now you got it, and its not all /r/gonewild and rule 34 sometimes you're gonna see stuff that offends your sensibilities like (possibly overly) speculative basic research notebooks.
Another aspect of the discussion that people don't like is one kind of scientific discovery is "I published in nature and 3 teams around the world have reproduced my work completely independently based on my paper" perhaps like YBCO, vs "holy cow I did ten experimental runs and I discovered upon analysis that run 7 has nuts results that mean something funky is happening donno what exactly but its a cool signal and it doesn't take a crystal ball to guess where my next experimental run will focus". Followed by enormous amounts of internet butt hurt on all sides by people confusing one kind of result for the other or insisting one or the other somehow proves the bible to be true because science is all just theories or wtf.
Final aspect to complain about is no one who knows anything about the field would disagree with "the field is getting ever more complicated over time". Could you please stop hatching completely new families of compounds at an ever increasing rate? I can't even keep up with the list of possible superconductor chemical families, the interval between new proposals is actually dropping not holding constant or increasing. Or rephrased the known areas that need research are expanding faster than the actual research is happening, so you think there's 1000 person-years of research out there and next year there's not 900 left, but 10000. Now in a field thats "boring" you do research deep in the decimal places by checking results and slightly improving. I donno, verification of gravitational constant or mass ratio of an electron to a proton or something. So all progress comes from doing the same old thing but a little better. But in a crazy nutso field that's exploding all progress comes from doing crazy kitchen chemistry and hooking stuff up to see what happens plus or minus some theoretical background. This leads to stereotypical internet butt hurt by people who can't tell the "style" of the fields apart. I guarantee you will never have a room temperature superconductor by slightly polishing the ratios of a YBCO or pretty much doing anything with niobium, it will absolutely come from people doing what appears to be lunacy with exotic copper oxides and strange organic molecules and just pure WTF. Its not like trying to make the worlds biggest telescope mirror or lowest noise radio telescope preamp, not at all. Judging a style by the wrong style will just result in so much butt hurt on all sides.
Its like being in propellant chemistry in the 50s, or transistor circuit design in the 60s, or computer science in the 70s, or AI in the (early) 80s, or internet technology in the 90s... superconductors are in an era of fast growth. Its fun to watch.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday June 10 2015, @06:49PM
I love how you posit that speculative science is more offensive than rule 34..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @07:37PM
I like how they both have a knee graph where "more is better" for some distance along the graph and then you hit the "eh a little too weird" and instantly its pitchforks and burning at stake time. Oh and everyone's got a different spot for that crazy knee where the paradigm suddenly shifts from "more tentacles" to "ugh too many tentacles must bleach eyes" or whatever.