SUPERCONDUCTORS

Josue A. Quinones Crespo

A team of Japanese physicists recently discovered a conductor to end all conductors: one that still works well even after 50 Kelvin. Superconductivity is an electrical resistance of exactly zero which occurs in certain materials below a characteristic temperature. Normally, superconductors are used to transport energy and usually they lose very little in the process, but most of the time they are copper based and extremely brittle after a certain heat threshold. Silver based superconductors are being used as well for their relative durability, but the cost of making them has made copper the current favorite, in spite of its obvious deficiencies.

The new superconductors are made from a fluorine enhanced iron arsenic material that can work at very high temperatures provided it is cooled constantly. They never burn out because the iron arsenic compound used to make the wire has an unequaled tolerance for low temperatures as well as high ones, sometimes exceeding tens of Kelvins. The capabilities of the powerful superconductors would make it last for hours on end pumping out high levels of electrical currents, something that the current ones cannot say. The materials used to manufacture this new type of superconductor are often cheaper than their silver and copper counterparts and offer the same type of production.

The only flaws that have been predicted with the iron arsenic superconductors are the amount of capital need to cool them down and the relative difficulty it takes to turn the compound into miles long strands of wire. These have generally been concerns regarding superconductors, but the benefits outweigh the flaws in various high electrical current applications. For example, MRI machines usually require massive amounts of electricity to operate for long periods of time. These new superconductors may be appealing to MRI machine manufacturers because it necessarily lowers the cost of materials and exceeds the shelf life of their current products. The experiment, led by scientist Hideo Hosono, looks at making superconductors more efficient in operation and more easily maintained, therefore making them widely available for heavy duty use. 

I found this story entertaining because I thought superconductors were a technology that was abundantly used in our modern world. I have heard the word tossed around a few times before, so I instantly assumed it was a commonly used technology. I am glad to see some research being done to progress our knowledge of superconductors because I believe it has much more potential than our current batch of superconductors. It is sad to see that so much heavy duty equipment is still operating with obsolete technology when we are just steps away from creating the new generation of conductivity. It is similar to having the technology to build the world’s fastest computer, but then saying it is too expensive or to inefficient to maintain instead of figuring out a way to make it cheaper and more efficient. Hosoma not only basically did just that, he paved the way for mass production of these new superconductors and hopefully they will be in use sometime in the near future.