Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow does a super conductor work?
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Hey, Daniel, when you think of physics, what images come to mind for you?
I think of the cosmos, I think of planets. I think of the fire inside the sun. I think of crazy people with weird hair.
When you look in the mirror when you think of physics, what's the difference? Well, what about a dance party.
I wouldn't say that's in the top one thousand associations I have, maybe not even in the top five thousand.
Well, it turns out that physics and dance actually have a lot in common. They have a lot of fun connections.
Is that right?
Yeah, they can help us understand the topic of our podc Est today.
That's right. Thinking about the way people dance and the way they shake their booty can actually help you understand the physics the crazy topic of today's podcast. So get out there, shake your booty and get ready to download some physics into your brain.
Get into the groove. It's time for physics. Hi am Jorge, and I'm Daniel, Welcome to our podcast Dancing with Physicists.
How far can you get across the universe by just dancing?
No, we're just kidding. You're not the victim of clickbait. This is the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
In which we take something weird, something fascinating in the universe and try to explain it to you, sometimes using dance.
Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about a physics phenomenon that is everywhere. It's everywhere, and it's helping make some of the greatest scientific experiments in the world.
That's right, it's really important, it's fascinating, it's weird, it's quantum, and yet it's not really very well understood. And most important, it's super that's right. And it conducts what it's conductive. There you go, that's right.
The topic of today's podcast is super conductors. What are they? Who are they? Who are they? Super?
No? Super Conductivity is a fascinating question, something behind a lot of really interesting research in the last few decades, and something we thought was worth getting into because there's a lot of puzzles there.
Yeah, I was just thinking the first time I heard about superconductors was in the eighties, right, and that's when it sort of became this big buzz about it.
That's right. They had a lot of big advances in the eighties. How old were you in the eighties.
Or I was old enough apparently to read about size news. But you would always see a tie to this footage of this little magnet floating on top of something.
Yeah, that's like a classic application of super conductivity.
Yeah, yeah, so I think forever that's what people think of. A lot of people think of when they think of superconductors, like that one image.
Yeah, there's that. There's also the super conducting super collider that they were going to build in Texas in the nineties that was going to cost a huge amount of money and that they canceled halfway through, and so a lot of people connect those two phrases super conducting and super colliding.
Oh yeah, I didn't hear about that one in the eighties. So it sort of seems like it's been out there in the popular culture for a while. But we were wondering how much people knew about.
It, and you know, it's part of the popular culture, and that people maybe have heard about it or whatever. Strangely, it hasn't really entered like, you know, comic books or science fiction that much. You don't see like super conducting technology all over the place in science fiction.
You mean, you haven't seen that comic book called The Superconductor.
Adventures of Crime Fighting super Conductors.
That's right. During the day, he's just a mild mannered, regular bus conductor, but at night.
He's a super duper conductor. No, I haven't seen that, and you don't see it, you know, playing a prominent role in science fiction movies, like particle physics is everywhere in science fiction movies. The Higgs boson explains everything and causes problems, et cetera. But you don't see superconductivity used and abused much in popular culture. Do you have I missed it?
Mm, yeah, I don't know. I guess it's not flashy, right, it's not. It's not a word that sounds as cool as quantum or leasers.
Or Higgs boson. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so I went around campus and I asked people, do you know it's touper conductivity is? Can you explain it? Do you understand it?
Here's what people had to say, what.
About super conductivity? Have you heard of that, Yes, can you explain that now? Best?
Guess maybe it has two conductors and for some stuff.
Okay, yeah, I've also heard of it, but I also have no idea either.
Okay, it's a phenomena that happens at very low temperatures because electrons have very low resistance to movement due to the very slow vibrations of the matrix of a metal of the nucleus of the atoms, so the electrons have a lot more space to move through.
Something along those lines. Was that the one with the magnets and they could float. That's about all I know about that one.
Right, No, I guess. So the conductivity with like wires for example, or like metal, so super conductive and then it's a good conductor doesn't burn out.
Cool.
I would assume that it has something to do with objects that are conductive.
Yeah, So I like the person who said that it has something to do with conductors and force and stuff.
That's right. And there's somebody out there who clearly is reading the same magazine you were, because they're like, oh, it has to do with magnets that can float.
Yeah, yeah, do you know what you Clive? What I'm talking about. I feel like they used the same clip for years and years and years and years and years.
Yeah, I totally know what you mean. A little black magnet floating over a very cool surface with like liquid hydrogen sublimating off of it. It's pretty cool looking.
Yeah, and then somebody comes and pokes the magnet and it just keeps floating there.
Yeah, exactly exactly. So people had some sense, you know, they knew what it was. Nobody was like, I've never heard that word before, what are you talking about? Right? But nobody could explain it to me. Like some people knew you had to be cold to be a superconductor, but nobody could give me a solid explanation for what it was and how it worked. Right.
I guess this one has something understandable, which is a conductor, and you know, I guess people in high school figure out that or learn that it's something that conducts electricity, and so a superconductor must just be something that is super added.
That's right, it's awesome at conducting.
That should be the next discovery.
Awesome conductors, that's right, superconductors last year, this year, awesome conductors next year, uber conductors. But there is really something special by superconductors, which is not just that they can conduct a lot, but that they conduct with no resistance at all. Right, you can't have anything better than a superconductor, so it is pretty amazing.
And they are really important for things like particle physics, right.
Yeah, they have a lot of really cool applications.
So it's like a physics phenomenon that has really great applications for important experiments like the Large Hadron collider.
That's right, And it's also a really fun physics puzzle. You know. The kind of physics that I I do personally is like take everything apart and understand the smallest bits. That's totally worthwhile. Obviously it leads to deep insights. But there's a whole different, other kind of way of doing physics that's like can we put things together in a weird way that makes weird materials? You know, we have lots of materials around us on Earth that we're familiar with, but you can think, like can we rearrange those bits to make new kinds of stuff. So there's a whole group of people out there in physics departments who's basically all their job is is to make new kinds of goo, Right, like, let's mix this together and add a little bit of that and a little bit of this, and maybe if we zap it with a laser, we'll get this weird crystal with strange behaviors that like nothing anybody's ever seen before.
Are you talking about solid state physics?
Yeah? These days I think they call it condensed matter physics condense man, But essentially, yeah, it's like, can we build new kinds of stuff? It's like the properties of bulk materials, you know, not individual particles, but like what happens when you put all these different kinds of particles together in a certain lattice, in a certain arrangement. Do they behave in strange ways? And what can we learn about you know, what solids can and cannot do.
Right, because they do different things, right, Like, you can make things behave in a totally different and new way just by the way you arrange them.
Yeah, and you know, the periodic table is the first lesson of that. Everything in the periodic table is made out of the same bits, right, protons and neutrons and electrons, but they're pretty different, right. Uranium is pretty different stuff than lithium, for example, And so you can get an incredible variety of behaviors just by rearranging the same stuff, and so solid state physics, that whole field is just taking that to an extreme. It's like, how can we combine these elements and zap them and chill them and heat them and do all sorts of crazy stuff. It's basically like cooking, right, what kind of cakes can you make with the same.
Ingredients right that tastes totally different.
Exactly and can float above your countertop? Right? Superconnecting cakes, that's the next breakthrough.
This is just rename that department stuff physics Stuff, physics of stuff.
Yeah, exactly, the physics of stuff. Yeah, hey, stuff is pretty interesting. Rights, the whole podcast called Stuff. You should know how stuff works and.
We should join that podcast network.
I think there's stuff pretty full.
Cool. So let's get into it all right, and let's break it down. So what's a superconductor. Let's start with just the conductor part, digging a little bit into what it means to be a conductor.
Right, So a conductor is something where electricity can move through it, right, and you have to understand the electricity moving through it. It's not necessarily the same as like electrons flowing through it. You put the electricity on one side of a wire and you get electricity on the other side of the wire. It's tempting to think about it like a hose, Like you put water on one side and water comes out the other side.
Like a tube.
Yeah, like a tube. And you know what happens is you put electrons in on one side, and the electrons all sort of over like it's like a tube full of water. You put a little bit of water in the front, and a little bit of a different piece of water that was already in there pushes out the side.
Oh.
It's kind of like if you have a two and you blow in it. The air that comes out the other end is not necessarily the air that came out of your mouth. It's like it causes some sort of It pushes all the air through, and the ones that come out are the ones that were waiting closest to the end exactly.
And that's only possible if the electrons can move, right, And so a conductor is just any material where you have electrons that can jump from atom to atom. Right, think about a material and a microscopic scale. It's really a bunch of atoms, right, And if it's simple or regular, then it's like a lattice like a grid. It's like regularly distributed atoms, and the electrons can jump from one to the other. So if you blow on one side, you like push in about some electrons on one side, then all the electrons sort of hop over one slot and you get some out the other side.
Oh, it's kind of like a like playing hot potato.
Yeah exactly. And the difference between something that can conduct electricity a conductor, and something that can't an insulator, is that conductors have enough electrons that can jump between atoms, whereas insulators have all their electrons held really tight by each of those atoms in the grid, so that there's no way for the electrons to jump from one to the other. So conductors have these free electrons that are sort of just like floating around happily.
Okay, So something that is not a conductor doesn't have kind of a spare electrons or they don't let electrons fly around freely.
Yeah exactly. And so and you just you know, you put electrons on one side and they just go nowhere, right, So you can't get electrons through the.
Material, Okay, So why not? So I introduce an electron in an insulator and something that doesn't conduct, what's going to happen to the electron?
It won't go through, yeah, just it won't cause a current. Right, You can't get a current through there. You can't get all the electrons to jump over one atom for example.
Okay, so it's kind of like a conductor has a bunch of atoms and everyone kind of has everyone's pretty loose with their electrons.
That's right.
Heay, here's one. Oh, I'll take one, or I'll give you another one. Oh. Electrons can just kind of flow through from atom to atom.
Yeah, And it's best to think of them really as a lattice, because these atoms individually act a little different than they do when they're together in a material, And when they're together in a material, the electrons slosh easily back and forth between them. For a conductor, for an insulator, that doesn't happen. And then of course there's lots of different kinds of conductors. There's things that are good conductors and things that are bad conductors.
And by a lattice, you mean like like a grid or like a like a rack, like the electrons are arranged kind of like in rows and in columns.
Right, yeah, exactly. If you zoom in on a crystal, for example, or a piece of metal, anything that has a regular arrangement of the atoms, you'll see that they're organized in this pattern. Right, they're built out of these basic units, and that they're pretty regular. You know, there's like lines of atoms. It's not just like a big heaping mess. These solids, these metals, these things that are conductors are pretty well organized, and so you'll see them in rows. And that's what we mean by the lattice. Yeah, just like a grid of atoms.
And so you're saying electrons can flow through or jump freely between atoms, but not perfectly.
Right, that's right. And here's where the temperature comes in. So the colder the material is. Think about what temperature really is. What is temperature? It's how much the atoms inside something are wiggling. The atoms inside liquid are wiggling more than the atoms inside of solid, right, which is why it's liquid, and the atoms inside of gas are totally free and bouncing around everywhere. But even inside a solid, even if it's solid, you have different temperatures. Right. You can have a piece of metal that's hot or piece of metal that's cold. What's happening there is that the atoms are moving less, right, They're wiggling less, and as it gets colder and colder, they wiggle less and less and less. And this is important for the electron because remember it's trying to jump from atom to atom. That's easier when the atom are not wiggling around, when they're like regularly spaced rows.
Yeah, like when they're frozen in place.
Yes, exactly. Here's where the dance analogy comes in. Right. Imagine trying to walk through a crowd and everybody's like jumping. It's like a mosh pit, right, and they're going crazy into pub concert or something. It's really hard to get across a crowded room if everybody's jostling and bouncing and moving around a lot, Right, It's much easier if they're calm, if they're like, you know, slow dancing or something.
Oh, it's kind of like, yeah, you would. If it's a mosh pit and everyone's moving and dancing, you would just kind of lose a lot of energy just kind of bumping against people and just trying to make it through.
Exactly. You would lose a lot of energy. That's exactly right. It's the resistance, right. So electrical resistance is electrons losing energy as they bump into the atoms that are wiggling around.
Because they're moving like. It's related to the kinetic motion of the atoms.
Yeah, absolutely, it's related to the kinetic motion of the atoms. It makes it harder for the electrons to get through, and as they get through, they lose some energy. Right.
Okay, so that's resistance, right, that's vehicles, the resistance of a wire or a conductor. That's what it is. It's like electrons going through but sort of bumping too much into the.
Atoms, that's right. And so things that are conductors have a low resistance, and you want to use things that have low resistance so that most of the energy you're sending along a wire, for example, gets there. You know, if you use something with low resistance, like copper or gold, then most of the energy you put into a wire will get to the other side. If you use something with really bad resistance, with a lot of resistance, then it'll heat up the wire. That energy from the electrons will create resistance, which turns into heat and that's not good.
But sometimes you sort of want resistance, right, Like in circuits, some resistors are sometimes good.
Yeah, sometimes you want resistance so you can put it in on purpose. For example, a light bulb, that's a resistor. Right. What it does is it steals the energy from the electrons and it heats of the material, which then glows and gives you light. Awesome, if that's what you wanted, right, Yeah, But you don't really want them wires in your house glowing. You want them to transmit that energy to your iPhone or whatever it is you're ascending. And those power lines along the road, right, we don't want those heating up and melting. We want those to transmit the energy from the power station to your house without losing much energy.
Unless your house is a dance floor, that would be pretty cool.
Well, how are you going to power those speakers without the electron?
Right?
Well, the speakers would glow too.
Sounds like an awesome party. Send me an invite.
And I think that brings us to a cool point, which is that the resistance of a conductor depends on the temperature.
Yeah, exactly, So as it gets colder, the lattice, this grid of atoms gets more regular, and it gets easier for the electrons to get through, and so the resistance goes down with temperature.
So a hot wire is harder to get electrons through it because all the apps are moving more, but a cold wire lets the electrons flow more easy.
That's right, All right.
Cool, that's a conductor, not somebody who drives a bus or directs an orchestra.
That person's also a conductor.
Yeah, yeah, But is he a superconductor?
Is he resistant?
Does he glow?
Does he steal energy from innocent electrons?
All right, that's a conductor, and now let's get into super conductors. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Com all right, Daniel, So it fills in what is a super conductor and what is so super about them?
Superconductors are really pretty super. The thing that makes them super is that they have zero resistance, not just like very small, not like epsilon resistance, but.
Zero, like zero points zero zero zero zero.
Keep going with the zeros there, man, because it's zero all the way. Wow, Okay, Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It means that, for example, if you had a loop of super conducting wire, you could put a current into it and it would just zoom around it forever. It would like never get used up. It's a pretty hard concept to imagine. It's like, it's like living in a world without friction. You know. It's like imagine you had a sheet of ice, you pushed a block on it, right, Yeah, you expect it to go for a while and then eventually slow down because every surface has some friction. But what if you had a perfectly smooth surface with no resistance and you pushed it, it would just go forever.
It's like a perpetual motion machine.
Yeah, sort of like that.
Or is it kind of like if you if you're in space and you start spinning something atop it's just going to keep spinning for a long time because there's nothing there's no air, no resistance, no nothing to stop it from spinning.
That's right, yeah, exactly. And so a superconductor is something that has zero resistance and so the electrons can just flow right through it. It's pretty amazing, all right.
So let's get into how that works. And I think what's cool I heard is that physicists don't really know what's going on.
Yeah, well there's some There are different kinds of superconductors, and some of them are pretty well understood, the old fashioned ones, the classic ones. But recently they've made a bunch of really strange superconductors that nobody really understands in great detail. I mean, we have some simulations we can describe it, but a lot of it's just too complicated or like write down equations on paper that we can understand.
Okay, So there's different flavors of conductors.
Yeah. The first thing they all have in common is that you've got to get it cold. Like we were saying earlier, you want to lower the resistance first, get it cold, and so chill that thing down. And people built refrigerators to get things down to like really really really cold temperatures like ten or twenty degrees kelvin. You know, that's like just above absolute zero.
And the point is that when it gets colder that cold, the grid in the material stops moving, it stops vibrating, right.
That's right, And you can't get anything down to actually absolute zero, but you can get it down really really cold, and the grid stops vibrating, as you say, and then it gets easier and easier for electrons to go through. And so that will bring you down to low resistance, even very low. Some might even say super low. But it won't get you all the way down to zero resistance.
Oh, I see, if you just had a regular like if I took a copper wire and I froze it to almost zero kelvin, it would give me pretty low resistance, but not necessaricessarily zero resistance.
I don't actually know if copper can become a superconductor, but I just mean that chilling it down is not all the explanation. To explain how something loses its resistance. You need more than just understanding that it gets colder and therefore it's easier for the electrons to go through. You need there's another piece of the explanation.
There's some extra magic going on there, some extra dance magic.
Yeah, exactly, because physics, if you just think about the temperature, physics says you shouldn't have superconductors, but we do have them. It was in the early part of the twentieth century that people made superconductors and observed it, and people thought, what, how is this even possible? And then the theorists spend decades thinking about it and trying to come up with explanations like we know this exists, right. This is one of my favorite things in science, when we have something we know it exists, but we don't know how it can work, Like it doesn't seem like it should be possible. Yet here we have one.
And then one night they went dancing and they figured it all out.
That's right. They were getting knocked over in amash and when they woke up from their concussion, they had a brilliant idea.
Well, that's kind of the analogy here, right, Like if you're this is a dance party and there's a mosh bin and people are jumping and going crazy, it'd be really hard to go through it. But if you suddenly turn out the music and everyone did the manic and challenge. It would be a lot easier to walk through it, but it wouldn't be perfectly easy to go through it. You still might bump into people, rub against people, and so the resistance would be low, but not zero.
That's right. So to get down to zero and took a really clever bit of thinking by theorists to explain how this could work. And it comes down to a concept called Cooper Pears. And the short version of the explanation is that electrons don't go through individually. They gather together into pairs, like you know, like pair dancing, like you know, square dancing or waltzing or whatever.
Oh my goodness, the dance analogies don't stop.
Why should they, Right, it's a dance party to the end of time, and going through in pairs they can accomplish actually zero resistance.
Okay, So it's sort of related to some quantum effects, right, Like, at some point to get to zero resistance, you need that sort of quantum magic to make it happen.
Yeah, which is really awesome because it's really fun when quantum mechanics it's not just like hidden under the rug, some tiny little effect that only affects tiny particles. When it actually gives you a macroscopic thing that you can measure, that you can see, you can prove. Look, quantum mechanics is real, and this is an example of that. And to understand it, the little bit of quantum mechanics you need to know is just that electrons are a certain kind of particle we call them fermions, and that kind of particle doesn't like to share. It doesn't like to be in the same state as another kind of particle. So you can't have two electrons both occupying, for example, the lowest rung on the energy ladder of an atom. They don't like to be in the same one. So if there's one already there, the next one will feel the second rung and the next one will fill the third rung. They don't all like to hang out together in the bottom rung, right.
Usually they like to dance Solu.
That's right, exactly. They all think they're the best dancer ever, and they just dance by themselves on the dance floor. But what happens when you get two of them together is that they act like the other kind of quantum particle we call those bosons. And bosons are totally happy to pile up on top of each other. They can occupy the same state, no big deal. Maybe you've heard of a Bose Einstein condensate. That's an example of a bunch of bosons getting really really cold and all sitting in exactly the same quantum state, the lowest energy state, and then they all act together and do really weird quantum effects. We should do a whole podcast on the bosee Einstein condensate. That's pretty cool stuff.
But there's something going on because normally electrons don't like to pair up like this, but when you cool down a superconductor, suddenly it becomes possible and even preferable for them to pair up.
Yeah. Well, electrons are both negatively charged, right, and so they don't like to hang out with each other. They repel each other quite a bit, but you only need a very slight attraction. These Cooper pairs are not like, they're not like really bound tightly together. They're just sort of like loosely associated. You know, they're like two people eyeing each other across the dance floor, sending signals back and forth.
So can you describe the effect here, Like, why do they pair up and how that helps him flow through the material.
The reason they pair up is that they essentially they deform the lattice in this in the same way, so like they're moving through the lattice together. There's grid of atoms. And you know, think of the lattice like you might think of like a mattress, right, like on your bed. If you sit down on the mattress, it makes a depression in it. Right. If somebody else sits on the mattress, it also makes a depression. And which way are you most likely to roll? Right? If there's a depression on the mattress another one next to it, you're going to lean in towards the center, right, unless you have like a really awesome, very expensive mattress. But making one depression makes it makes you attracted to the next depression, right, mmm.
And so that's what kind of brings the electronics together.
Mm hmmm exactly. They sort of shake the lattice in this way that makes them more likely to be closer to each other than further apart.
And it has to be cold, because if the whole bed is shaking and moving, you know this effect is not going to matter.
Be careful pretty soon we're going to be doing analogies involving dancing and beds and you know where that's going to go?
Dirty dancing.
Yeah, keep your dancing one hundred percent vertical here.
Folks, I see where are you going with that?
So the electrons are moving through the lattice and they like to stay together. There's a very small attractive force that keeps them in pairs. You know, it doesn't they don't like touch. It's not like they're you know, it's a new particle with a minus two charge or anything. They're just sort of like grouped together as they move through the lattice. And because the electrons by themselves are fermions, things that don't like to share states, but together they're boson, then they act differently. If you heard, for example, of liquid helium. Liquid helium is a superfluid. It's something that can flow without any resistance. And the reason is that helium is a boson, right, The atom itself is a boson, and when it gets really really cold, it can flow without resistance. And so electrons are kind of like that. When they get really really cold, they pair up, and these cooper pairs are bosons, so they can share states just like liquid helium atoms, and they can then they can slide through the lattice with basically zero resistance. It's sort of incredible.
It's kind of like, individually, this whole mess of atoms blocking their way. But once they pair up, it's almost like the loss of physics. They're operating under a different set of laws of physics almost, And so then suddenly the highway opens up in front of them.
Yeah. Yeah, It's like following somebody through a dance floor is easier than going through the dance floor yourself, right, And so two people moving through the dance floor together sort of orbiting around each other a little bit, just sort of make the other dancers move out of their way just the right way for them to slip through without feeling any resistance.
It's like crowdsurfing exactly.
It's like crowdsurfing, and it's a subtle effect, you know. This attraction between the electrons is small, and so it took people a long time to understand this. There were a lot of crazy ideas people had to explain superconductivity, most of which were wrong, and this one crazy idea which turned out to be true.
And so that's why they have to be cold so that there's sort of room for these electrons to get together.
That's right. Superconductivity was discovered in materials like ten or twenty degrees kelvin, and as we said, that's necessary to have the regular lattice and to have this thing happen. And also, this attraction between the electrons is very fragile, and so if things are too hot, then that attraction is really is hard to make. And so for a long time people thought, well, superconductors are cool, they have cool applications, but geese, if you've got to be twenty degrees calvin, that's not very practical. You know, you're not going to have the wires in your house being twenty degrees kelvin. That's super cold.
Okay, let's get into the different flavors as superconductors, but first let's take another break.
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All right. So, Daniel, you were telling me that there are different flavors of superconductors, like super duper conductors.
Well, they are all superconductors, but they're made in different ways, different kinds of materials. So for like fifty years, there are only a few superconductors that were known. But then in the eighties, probably described by this magazine article you read, there was a breakthrough. People found superconductors that could work at relatively high temperatures, you know, up to like maybe between thirty and one hundred degrees Calvin. That's still super cold. I mean, yeah, I think parts of Canada might be one hundred degrees calen right now.
And these are like metals or I think I read they're ceramics, right, They're not just all metals there. Some of them are ceramics.
Yes, some of them are ceramics exactly, which really surprised people. But they can do super conductivity at fairly high temperatures, you know, versus thirty degrees and then fifty degrees and the sixty degrees, and these days they're up above one hundred degree use Calvin, which is still pretty cold, but it's it's getting closer to like the liquid nitrogen level, where you can get something cold pretty cheaply. If you need something down like ten degrees Calvin, you have to have superworld class refrigeration and liquid helium, which is all very hard. You only need something pretty cold. You can use liquid nitrogen, which is cheap and easily available and so maybe practical.
Yeah, you can just go down to the store and pop open a bottle of liquid nitrogen.
That's right. And this is a pretty exciting field because every few years, like a new kind of materials discovered that can do superconductivity at a higher temperature. So like every five years, i'd's like, hey, look I zapp this with this new kind of goo and nicemeared peanut butter on it and dunked it in liquid nitrogen and fried in the microwave, and look now it's a superconductor.
I think your colleagues are probably regretting having talked to you at this point.
Probably, I mean not literally, they're not actually using peanut butter, but they are just exploring wacky stuff and sometimes they're surprised, like there's an amazing kind of superconductor that uses these graphs fiend sheets, right, this really weird arrangement of carbon. If you take two of them, two sheets, and you twist one at just the right angle, then the sheets together can act like a superconductor.
And you were saying that these high temperature superconductors, they're the ones that we don't really understand.
Yeah, because remember, to have superconducting materials, you need these cooper pairs to move through the materials, so you need their electrons to be attracted to each other somehow. But that attraction is very, very very low, and so if the material's hot, then that attraction is basically nothing compared to the energy of the electrons and the energy of the lattice, and so it's hard to understand how that works. And there are a lot of smart people working right now on theories of high temperature superconductors, and you know, they have some tools that have good simulations that can describe this and describe that, but it's not as far advanced as the theories of low temperature superconductors. And that's important because we'd like to predict, like, hey, will this material be a superconductor or what materials should we make in order to have superconductors that work at room temperature. That's the final goal.
And so nobody really understands how these works been and it's kind of hard because you can't just sort of like poke it right. You can't just sort of open it up and look at what's going on. You have to kind of use theory in simulations.
Yeah, exactly. It's a complicated problem, but it's really interesting. You know, people love making new kinds of stuff and trying to get it to do weird things and understanding these mysteries. I think it's really fun. These guys have a lot of fun building these simulations and thinking about it. Yeah, and you know, I asked them like, do you think there will ever be room temperature superconductors? And nobody wants to say yes, because that's predicting the future. But there is a lot of confidence because every few years we get a new kind of superconductor that's warmer than any of the others. And so if that continues, you know, in another few decades, we might get superconductors that are at fairly warm temperatures.
It's all about finding the right recipe exactly.
It's finding the right recipe, the right kind of ingredients, mix them in the right kind of way, zap them with the right kind of laser, all this kind of stuff.
Do a dance a certain way.
Exactly, you got to do the dance. Okay.
So that's super conductorance and how they work. But sort of their biggest application is kind of not really in conducting electricity. It's more in magnets, right, and making super magnets.
That's right. Of course, there's a connection because how do you bank an electromagnet?
Right?
How do you make a magnet that you can turn on and off? But you do that by having something which conducts electricity, you make a loop of current, because a loop of current will make a magnet. And so if you have something which can do super conducting electronics, then you can have current flowing through at a really high rate and it doesn't heat up and break down or anything. And so you can get really strong magnets.
Oh it lets you make magnets that you can turn on and off. It's like a yes, electric magnets.
Yeah, electromagnets. You can turn them on and off. You can dial their strength up and down, which is really important for a particle collider.
And if you use superconductors then you can there's no resistance and so you can really get really strong magnets.
Yeah, exactly. And you want really strong magnets that are pretty small that don't take you know, that aren't like the size of a school bus or something. So you want them to be powerful, you want them to be small, and that's what we need at the particle collider. And also you want super strong magnets for other things like who doesn't want to ride in a magnetically levitating train that would be awesome, right.
The others are the magnev ones in Japan.
Right, yeah, exactly, And so the stronger the magnets, the easier that technology is, the more practical that technology is. Right, and so superconductors play a lot of role in making really strong magnets. But then also very directly, you know you want superconductivity, Well, it would be great to have in your transmission lines. Like we were saying earlier, your electricity would be cheaper if you could get it straight from the power station without losing any energy. Right, they lose a significant fraction of the energy they generate just in sending it to us.
Oh my gosh, So if you can, Yeah, if you find a recipe for a room temperature superconductor, you would revolutionize everything.
Right, you would be a zillionaire and you could just dance all night and not have to worry about anything. Ever again, seriously, that would be a zillion dollar invention temperature.
Superconductors, like you would you would haven't liked a grid with no loss like your you know, your phone wouldn't heat up and lose energy.
Wow. Yeah, Plus it would be a fascinating mystery of physics, like how does that happen? How is it possible? I love when we can create stuff if we don't understand because It gives us like a concrete hook into some mystery of the universe, something that says, there's something here that will teach you a lesson. There's some insight here waiting for you to discover. And of course there could be insights anywhere, you never know. But when you have something physical that you don't understand, you know there's an insight there. There's like a concrete clue you can follow up, you know. So to me, that's very exciting. Wow.
Yeah, all right, Well, I think that we can safely conclude that superconductors have to do with conductors and force and stuff.
And dance and dancing. So we have danced our way through this topic, and we hope that you enjoyed it and that you now understand a little bit more about superconductivity.
So go out there and find a pair to dance with. And they don't necessarily have to be called.
Cooper, that's right, And they even can have the same charge. Right. Sometimes opposites attract, sometimes electrons attract.
Oh my goodness, how many times can we dance around this pun?
I don't know. I think we're breaking down. We'll break dancing.
We brooke to dance, all right, guys, thanks for joining us. See you next time.
See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielanorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy Tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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