It may turn out to be easy. I am looking for lamination between
superconducting material and electronic control surfaces for the
manufacture of the shell of a MFEV (google on this blog). This means
we can easily investigate behavior before committing to manufacturing
processes.
Of course it is never quite that easy but it makes a good story and
avoids the hard problem of explaining why it works okay. We will
take it.
All this is still very much in the basic research stage, although the
time to commercialization has been falling far faster than it ha in
the past.
Scotch Tape aids
superconductivity breakthrough
U of T professor Ken
Burch lead a team which has developed a new technique to induce
high-temperature superconductivity in a semiconductor for the first
time by using Scotch tape.
No, you can’t use
duct tape for everything.
Valerie Hauch
Published on Thursday
September 13, 2012
Sometimes, only Scotch
tape will do.
Take it from an
international team of physicists, led by the University of Toronto,
which used double-sided Scotch tape to give a semiconductor the
properties of a high-temperature superconductor.
The results of the
experiment, published Tuesday in the online journal Nature
Communications,may help in the development of new devices that could
be used in quantum computers and to improve energy efficiency.
The U of T team
leader, physicist Ken Burch, explained that duct tape would have been
too strong to use in the experiment, conducted last summer, and might
have damaged materials.
“Scotch tape is
sticky, but not too sticky,’’ he said.
High-temperature
superconductors conduct electricity without heating up and losing
energy at liquid nitrogen temperatures. They’re the building blocks
for the next-generation quantum computers. Yet their properties,
found in compounds of iron, copper and oxygen, cannot be incorporated
into semiconductors such as silicon used in computer chips because of
the differences in structure and chemical makeup.
That’s where the
tape came in.
The team used the
two-sided tape and glass slides to put the high-temperature
superconductor close to a particular type of semiconductor, called a
“topological insulator,’’ which is very metallic at the
surface.
The tape was used,
said Burch, “to peel away the top surface’’ of the
superconductor and the semiconductor, which conducts energy “but
just barely.’’
As a result,
superconductivity was induced in the semiconductor, a physics
“first.’’
So, what does it mean?
“I wish I could tell
you we cured cancer,’’ said Burch jokingly. “We kind of opened
the door to this new interface between high-temperature
superconductors and semiconductors which basically was thought to be
impossible to make.’’
New advances that
could come out of this, he says, include the development of
technology such as quantum computers, which would use the power of
atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks.
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