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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday September 04 2015, @08:12AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday September 04 2015, @05:17PM
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.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 1) by GDX on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:02AM
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.