Room Temperature Superconductors
Ever since superconductors were first discovered, the hunt for the grail - a room temperature superconductor - has been on. Superconductors are materials that pass electricity without any resistance. All other conductors have a resistance to the current passing through them, which appears as heat. For instance, when you’ve been on your mobile phone for a while it becomes hot, and that is because of the heat generated by the current flowing in the electrical components of the phone. If superconductors were used then the phone wouldn’t waste so much of the battery power generating that heat.
The problem with existing superconductors is that they need to be chilled to very low temperatures before they start superconducting. Even the highest temperature superconductors we know about need to be more than 130 degrees Celsius (Centigrade for those of you who are as old as me) below the freezing point of water. This makes them rather difficult to use in everyday things like mobile phones and power transmission cables.
For some years now there have been tantalizing hints that carbon treated with various other substances might be showing some of the signs superconduction at room temperatures. But not enough for anyone to stake their reputation on! Now, however, a group at the University of Leipzig have treated graphite with water and detected, at room temperatures, signs of phenomena that are normally present in superconducting materials. The effect is weak, it looks as though only a tiny part of the material is actually superconducting, but, if repeat experiments can reproduce the effect, then the hunt will be on to figure out what is happening.
It’s very early days, and the whole thing may well turn out - like faster than light neutrinos - to be a problem with experimental set up. But, if it does prove to be true that room temperature superconductors are possible, then we could look forward to a massive increase in the efficiency of electrical devices that will completely revolutionize the amount of electrical energy we use.
http://phys.org/news/2012-09-doped-graphite-flakes-superconductive-properties.html#nwlt
Alan Lenton
30 September 2013