This is craziness!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA

Tel-Aviv University demos quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.

Gota love just making up names that sound cool.

Tel-Aviv University demos quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.


Quantum levitation sounds cooler tho, so hey they gota market it somehow huh?

I wonder why the word Quantum is used?

When they can do that at high temperatures, with inexpensive materials..... its gonna be awesome.

Not sure its possible, at least not with the materials we have available right now. These properties only occur in certain materials as they come closer to absolute zero. The phenomena is called Quantum fluid or super fluid, where the electrons flow like a fluid with zero resistance. In this 5th state of matter we see these kinds of properties, but thermal energy disrupts the process. (Maybe this is why its called Quantum levitation in the vid.)

Its my opinion that we will never see this phenomena outside of high pressures, and/or low temperatures. This opinion of course is not one of a solid state physicists so take it with a grain of salt. Perhaps those better educated can chime in, I think a couple guys here deal with these kinds of things.

Progress is being made on a steady basis toward the "room temperature superconductor". We made a major leap when we got the temp up to the point where cheap liquids like Nitrogen are all that is needed. We will get there eventually.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Scientists-may-be-closer-to-room-temperature-1697506.php

I'm well aware that this particular effect is tied to events that, thus far, only occur or are useful at low temperatures, but I also consider the entire field of materials science to be in its infancy; and this subdomain of solid state physics is fairly new, too.

Can we (ever?) create molecule sized local environments that have the necessary qualities? Can we (ever) create chemical structures that isolate atomic thermal vibrations the way we isolate macro scale vibrations? If we forget about creating a single homogeneous material that has these qualities, but instead create individual pockets with the qualities, surrounded by some kind of supporting infrastructure... could we discover new ways to insulate and cool a material, maybe with networks liquid-H capillaries, and just use liquid-H as another material consumed to operate something, the way we add gas to cars and grease to many machines - which would not be a 'high temperature material', rather a 'way to make this useful in high temperature environments'

If we pose the problem from one angle, we may find that it really is 'impossible' to solve it. But if the goal is not "a uniform material than natively, intrinsically has this quality at room temps", but if the goal is rather "any means of producing devices that can perform the same way at high temperatures, and cheaply"... I wouldn't too casual place limits on what we might accomplish.

I don't think that nanites are impossible, and we haven't even begun to properly investigate the new materials that nanites might be producing for us.

There is another road to superconductivity other than basic material science. We already have the laser technology to dampen atomic vibrations. On a larger scale, lasers could be turned on to cool a device to the point of superconductivity, then the device could operate as needed.

As material science advances, so does the field of laser dampening.

Yeah, and if we think only in terms of how we go about producing lasers today, and the means by which we use lasers for dampening, we might find many obstacles that seem impossible to solve - and which might never by solved using those approaches. But the very fact that we can use lasers to dampen opens the door to as-yet-unimagined ways to 'cool' a material. By cool I don't necessarily mean 'accomplishing a net movement of heat out of the material', only 'forcing a portion of the non-uniform material to cease thermal vibration (with a small net increase in overall temperature, naturally).

You lost me on that last part. We direct the laser at the material to absorb the heat. The "hotter" light goes on it's merry way leaving the material with no thermal energy. The "system" is the object being bombarded so there is a net loss of energy to the system. Your comment sounds like there is a net gain. Near absolute zero can be reached with laser dampening.

That's how we might imagine using laser cooling on a large object in the future, as an extension of what we've done on a smaller scale in a laboratory.

All I was saying is that if we are looking at laser cooling, we might not need to be limited to that situation - just as an example of an expected solution to this problem: we might find that we can allow our levitating object to be, overall, at high temperatures, and still exploit an effect that requires near-absolute-zero temperatures, by creating a series of small domains that are near absolute-zero within a larger, supporting framework that isn't (overall) near absolute zero.

Think of the surface of a modern hard drive vs a hand held magnet. Imagine chatting with someone in the 1600s, and explaining how hard drives use magnetism (which they think of as a property of larger, visible objects - not as a property of microscopic domains) to store information as we do.


Suppose we figured out how to use a microscopic laser diode to force a microscopic domain of a superconducting material near absolute zero (causing the immediately adjacent regions to increase in temperature). This seems not-sustainable, since the heat from those adjacent regions would naturally vibrate the damped region, or if separated by vacuum would radiate infrared into the damped region - but if the diode was effective at continuously force-damping the cooled region, maybe it could be done.

I'm suggesting that it might be possible to build a layered material that contains normally conducting material (to power the lasers) maybe just etched in silicon, damping laser diodes, domains of damped/cooled superconductor, and insulator - with each of these layers being extremely small. We might then have a material which has the qualities of a supercooled superconductor, while being warm to the touch, removing the need to external cooling infrastructure. You just power the composite material, and though it gets slightly warmer, portions of a layer within the composite material are forced near absolute zero. Maybe, just maybe, the levitating qualities of those domains could be used.

Its really insane (as in amazing) when you think about harddrive technology as the grandchild of, say, the mariners compass. Who knows what we can do with the 'miniature domain' approach to levitating superconductors.

I don't think there is any reason for us to believe that this specific idea is possible - but the point I'm trying to make is not at all dependent on this particular idea. Its just an example of how we might solve the "cheap, room temperature levitating superconductor" problem in an unexpected way.

I understand what you meant now. We have done a lot of things at work that wouldn't have made much sense twenty years ago. The advances in science are usually small but there are lots of advances. By coincidence, the physics of the magnetic hard drive and the laser dampening cooling both won Nobel prizes. I have been lucky enough to work on some interesting material science projects using lasers at the atomic level.

Some toys are just loads of fun.

Very interesting, I think I did hear something about that.

Would be nice if they could 'tune' it to 'dampen' a cascading atomic event.

Aim the laser at the bomb... Poof. It becomes a falling rock and not an angry mushroom.