Want 100% efficiency electronics?
How about levitating transportation?
Faster supercomputers?
Duh-duh-nuh-nuh!!!
Superconductors to the rescue!
As long as the world you live in is close to absolute zero, that is.
See, superconductors are materials with all of these amazing potential applications...but
the conditions required for them to work are pretty extreme.
It’s gonna take a LOT of work to get us closer to a world where we could use superconductors
on the daily...and new research has gotten us just a little closer.
Simply put, a superconductor is a material that electricity can flow through without
losing energy along the way.
It’s a material with no resistance, it doesn’t diminish an electric current as the current
passes through it.
The microscopic structure of a superconductor is like a uncongested highway, letting electrons
travel through the material with ease.
Which is HUGE, right?
That means they can conduct electricity more efficiently than any other material.
Imagine, electricity buzzing along superconducting wires without losing any energy to But these
materials don’t just get their powers from their particular microscopic structure.
They also have to be really, really frickin’ cold.
Like, many hundreds of negative degrees celsius.
So that kinda cools off a lot of the hype around them.
See, a material’s conductivity either increases or decreases with a rise in temperature, depending
on what kind of material it is.
The conductivity of semiconductors and insulators increases with higher temperature because
more electrons are freed up to joint the current, whereas for conductors, conductivity increases
as temperature goes down.
At colder temperatures, there are less thermal vibrations that get in the way of those electrons
and keep them from traveling through the material efficiently.
Ultra high pressures are also good at keeping things still enough for electrons to pass
through with less trouble.
If we could use superconductors in electronics, those devices would theoretically run at perfect
or near perfect efficiency--they would output the same amount of energy that’s put into
them.
That would be SUPER useful, you can imagine, when trying to get electricity into your home.
In the US we lose about 5-6% of our electricity every year during transmission from the grid
to your house because of issues like resistance.
That’s about as much energy as it would take to power about 23 million homes for a
year.
What a waste, right?
If that electricity was travelling via superconductor, we wouldn’t lose any along the way.
Think about it another way--you could power a supercomputer without losing any energy
to heat, meaning you would have a supercomputer you could do more with--more calculations,
more speed, with less energy input because you wouldn’t have to cool it off.
They also do a really cool thing where if you put them next to a strong magnet, the
magnet causes the superconductor to have its own, opposite magnetic field.
Making the superconductor levitate above the magnet!
Superconductors and their magnetic capabilities are already used in important medical technology
like MRIs, which help doctors see inside your body.
But there’s a reason getting an MRI is so expensive--and it’s because the machine
itself is so expensive.
And that’s partly because the superconductor inside of it has to be kept so.
Dang.
Chilly.
So it’d be pretty amazing if we could make a superconductor that works at room temperature,
right?
So far, the material that’s achieved superconductivity closest to room temperature is a rare hydrogen
sulphur compound that maintains its properties at up to steamy -70 degrees celsius...but
that’s only because it was at a pressure over a million times the one we comfortably
live at.
But.
Despair not.
An exciting new research project has unveiled new materials that get us closer to the goal
of superconductors that we could use in real life--y’know at room temperature and pressure.
The team of Russian, American, and Chinese scientists has now successfully created several
new species of uranium hydride.
Although these U-H materials were made under extreme pressures, the researchers showed
that the compounds remained stable at much more reasonable pressures--close to atmospheric.
AND the researchers predict that the characteristics of these compounds they’ve observed so far
mean that eventually, an improved version of uranium hydrides could be superconducting
at room temperature.
No big deal!
Just as a little extra dash of awesome, the fact that they were able to predict the existence
and behaviors of these compounds and successfully verify those predictions with their experiments
means that their predictive capabilities are pretty solid...meaning they could use the
same methods to explore other promising materials to keep searching for the superconductor that
could bring us into the future of technology, without the limitations of the icebox.
Fun fact: Several cities in Japan, Korea, and China already use superconducting technology
in MagLev trains.
These trains can reach super high speeds because there’s no friction of the train on the
track--because the train is floating ABOVE the track.
If you want to learn more about supercapacitors, a close cousin of superconductors, check out
this video here, and make sure you subscribe to Seeker so we can update you on the progress
of all your favorite dream technologies.
Thanks for watching!