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posted by martyb on Friday September 04 2015, @06:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the resistance-is-futile dept.

An international research team from Canada and Germany has been able to demonstrate that graphene can be made to behave as a superconductor when it's doped with lithium atoms. The researchers believe that this new property could lead to a new generation of superconducting nanoscale devices.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without resistance and without dissipating energy. In ordinary materials, electrons repel each other, but in superconductors the electrons form pairs known as Cooper pairs, which together flow through the material without resistance. Phonons, the mechanism that facilitates these electrons' alliances are vibrations in lattice crystalline structures.
...
In a research paper available on arXiv, the researchers demonstrated in physical experiments that the computer models were indeed correct in their predictions. Andrea Damascelli at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, together with collaborators in Europe, grew layers of graphene on silicon-carbide substrates, then deposited lithium atoms onto the graphene in a vacuum at 8 K, creating a version of graphene known as "decorated" graphene.

The full paper is available.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday September 04 2015, @08:12AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 04 2015, @08:12AM (#232169) Journal
    It looks like it isn't a technological triumph (better superconductors exists), but the actual success was the confirmation of that computer model they used for predicting the behaviour.
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  • (Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday September 04 2015, @05:17PM

    by Covalent (43) on Friday September 04 2015, @05:17PM (#232341) Journal

    Agreed. The Tc is 5.9K, which is far too cold to be of any use. But if the model they use gets better as a result of this data, then the quest for a room-temperature superconductor might be one step closer to reality.

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    • (Score: 1) by GDX on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:02AM

      by GDX (1950) on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:02AM (#232494)

      True a room-temperature superconductor is great, but why not develop near perfect conductors, even a conductor with less than one tenth of the resistance of copper can be a great technological breakout, this is a area mainly forgotten and possible easier to archive than a room-temperature superconductor.