• Question: How could the discovery of a room temperature superconductor advance science and society as a whole, and do you think it will happen in the near future?

    Asked by anon-251974 on 27 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Chris Dawson

      Chris Dawson answered on 27 Apr 2020:

      It would allow us to send energy really long distances without losing power. Imagine a cable that could be 1000 miles long and there would be no energy lost… It would also let us make lots of devices like motors, generators, medical scanners, transmitters much more powerful as we wouldn’t have to worry about the waste heat that’s normally generated in these machines due to the massive amounts of electricity used. Superconductors would let us use lots of electricity without heating up the wires, at the moment we have to use cooling systems like liquid nitrogen to get round this, which is really expensive and impractical!
      It’s very hard to know when we’ll get room temperature superconductors, but there’s lots of money to be made so big teams of very smart people are working on the problem!

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 27 Apr 2020:

      It somewhat depends on he nature of the room-temperature superconductor. Assuming it was something that could be manufactured on a large scale and made into wires, it would revolutionise the distribution of electric power, because you would be able to send electricity over very long distances without losing energy. (Because power is voltage*resistance, if the resistance is zero no power is dissipated.) This would have major impacts in all sorts of areas.

      It could be, however, that your room-temperature superconductor is difficult to work with. For example, the existing “high-temperature” superconductors (where “high” in this case means liquid nitrogen temperatures as opposed to liquid helium temperatures) have not been as useful as was originally hoped because they are ceramics rather than metals and thus difficult to make electrical circuits from. Also, having a superconductor “quench” (that is, go from superconducting to non-superconducting) is very destructive, because a lot of energy gets released – when one of the superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Colloder at CERN quenched when the accelerator was nearly ready for use, it blew a hole in the liquid helium cooling system and took about a year to fix. So your “room-temperature” superconductor actually has to be a “safely above room-temperature” superconductor if you really want to use it in everyday applications – you do not want your power distribution network to fail in a heatwave!
      I am not optimistic about room-temperature superconductors in the near future, but I could be wrong: the discovery of the liquid-nitrogen-scale “high-temperature” superconductors was a complete shock (I am old enough to remember this!).

    • Photo: James Smallcombe

      James Smallcombe answered on 28 Apr 2020:

      Without the need for all the cooling systems (cryogenics) of currents super conductors, our particle accelerators could become a lot smaller. Also it would ease the demand on the global helium supply used for cooling super conductors, so that devices such as MRI scanners in hospitals wouldn’t be reliant on the supply. And it could help with green transport, allowing more efficient electric engines and maglev trains. But unfortunately I think we still have to wait a while to see if a room temperature superconductor is possible.

    • Photo: Adam Baskerville

      Adam Baskerville answered on 28 Apr 2020:

      Room temperature superconductors have a wide array of potential applications, but there is a lot of glamour surrounding them, painting them to be a miracle cure for all our problems.

      A current travelling round a loop of superconducting material will cycle forever, making them an excellent choice for energy storage. They could replace standard lithium ion chemical batteries which have a very poor charge/discharge efficiency. There is however a limit to the amount of power that can be stored in a superconducting battery as over a certain magnetic field strength the effect of superconductivity is lost.

      Room temperature superconductors could replace standard power cables all over our power network lowering power losses and saving a lot of money and energy; however we need to factor in the cost of our imaginary room temperature superconductor. It will most likely be made from a variety of elements some of them potentially being quite rare and toxic. Power line cables are currently made primarily from aluminium which is an incredibly cheap metal and will be much cheaper to produce than our new room temperature superconducting cable. Even given time to improve manufacturing efficiency it will still be unlikely to match the cost of aluminium. This could also minimise the initial use of room temperature superconductors in electronic devices as they would add too much cost.

      This is not to downplay the significance of a room temperature superconductor as it would be a breakthrough discovery, but the applications are trickier in implementation and will most likely be felt many decades from their initial discovery. The temperature at which superconductivity has been achieved does keep increasing but I do not think we will discover one in the short term, but I am optimistic about the long term. I believe that their main application will be found in storing energy from renewable energy sources, or the introduction/construction of magnetically levitating (Maglev) trains which will greatly benefit from them.

Comments

  • Photo: Greg

    Greg commented on :

    As someone who is working on superconductors I can say that it is quite likely indeed that we will see a room temperature superconductor in the next few decades! However they will almost certainly be hydrides which require hundereds of gigapascals of pressure to form (the pressure at the bottom of the mariana trench is about 0.1 GPa). They are admittedly not very practical. However the highest temperature one is lanthanum decahydride (LaH10) which has a critical temperature of -23*C, which is room temperature if your room is in Antarctica!

    A quick note on the practicality of other high temperature superconductors though. Power cables have been made out of high temperature superconductors and have been connected to the grid at a small scale in Japan. Scientists have also developed flexible superconducting tape for smaller scale purposes. High temperature superconductors are already used in pretty much anything that requires a big magnet, from MRI machines to maglev trains to the particle collider at CERN. They are useable, It’s a question of whether there is enough demand to justify the cost.

    I think the most revolutionary change would be in the renewable enrgy sector. Solar power is already cost effective, the only trouble is that it produces DC electricity, as opposed to the AC electricity produced by most other forms of power plant. DC electricity loses much more power when it is transmitted than AC, which means it is inefficient to set up a massive solar farm in the sahara and use that to power europe. However, superconducting cables solve that problem!

    Superconductors are also cruicial to Google’s revolutionary quantum computer and will very likely be the basis for the first practical generation of quantum computers. Given all the records that the computer has been smashing the next logical step is to make it work at higher temperatures. Currently it only works at a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. A room temperature superconductor would make this sort of quantum computer a LOT cheaper, provided it was the right sort of superconductor. Some have the wrong ‘gap symmetry’. They still superconduct but the quantum properties that quantum computers rely on become messier.

    Also we could all have levitating skateboards.