Silicon compound superconducts at room temperature

[groovychk]

PORTLAND, Ore. — A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling.

Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=HTTOTGYXPCPWSQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=206904213

I was starting to think we'd never get on track for room temperature super-conducting.

Comments

[kyrie1618.livejournal.com]

No. Fucking. Way.

*reads*

Are there any superconductors that are semiconductors at high temp / low pressure? If so, I want to watch the bandgap change back and forth. It's got to be relevant!

I hear Larry Niven predicted wrong so far... superconductors only superconduct electricity, not heat. So the superinsulator of electricity that we have so far: does it superinsulate heat? Because in normal materials, the two properties are linked. Except in diamond, and other funky things like that. Phonons suck.

... or do they mean something else by "resist heating"? Is the heating they speak of electrical or radiation or thermalconduction?

Dear Santa: I can has Magsails?

How much pressure is required? I like linuxguru's idea to trap it in something else - maybe a bucktube? Should be strong enough, but of course then our wires will be very short indeed! Borrow a page from the cold fusion people and use palladium? Nah, then we can never produce enough. Designer molecules that absorb and compress hydrogen? Ooh.