Chapter 408: New Ideas for Room-Temperature Superconductivity
"My personal suggestion is not to rush to promote the 202K high-temperature superconducting cable technology..."
The reason Xu You made this suggestion was not because he was worried that the technology was not mature enough.
But there are some other ideas.
In the field of superconductivity, Xu You believes that we are still far from the end.
In the proposal, Xu You explained the theoretical basis for his suggestions.
Currently, various research on superconductivity is progressing in an orderly manner.
Within a few years, there is great hope that another major breakthrough will be achieved in the field of superconductivity.
Although building high-temperature superconducting cables plays a big role in saving transmission losses, building the cables themselves requires a lot of cost.
This part of the cost is difficult to recover in the short term, and it may even take decades to pay back.
If a better superconducting material is discovered within a few years, we will need to rebuild it.
Xu You's proposal was well-founded and received unanimous agreement within the group.
After all, in the field of superconductivity, no one in the world is more professional and authoritative than Xu You.
…
In a recent report, the room-temperature superconductivity project studied by Lin Shi and others also made new progress.
After many experiments, it has been proved that the superconducting critical temperature of many high-temperature superconductors has increased to varying degrees under ultra-high pressure and strength.
These superconductors can all be called "room-temperature superconductors" in a broad sense.
"Teacher Xu, we have discovered several superconducting materials whose superconducting critical temperatures are all over 300K in the range of 200GPa to 500GPa. As long as extremely high pressures are met, they can indeed achieve superconductivity at room temperature."
300K in thermodynamic temperature is approximately equivalent to 27 degrees Celsius in Celsius, which can be said to be true room temperature.
Although before this, many people believed that high-pressure room-temperature superconductors only had theoretical significance and no practical application value.
But Xu You now feels that this may provide a new idea for achieving room-temperature superconductivity.
"Very good. What we need to do next is to study the core mechanism of these superconducting materials that can increase the superconducting critical temperature under high pressure. During this period, I will do more experiments with you."
Since Xu You has already given the suggestion of delaying the popularization of the 202K high-temperature superconducting cable project.
Xu You should naturally shoulder the responsibility and put the project progress on the agenda.
If there is nothing particularly important, Xu You will follow the next experiment throughout.
In the next experiment, Xu You participated in the experiment as promised.
"Lin Shi's current experimental operation level is really perfect."
Seeing Lin Shi's skillful operation during the experiment, Xu You couldn't help but marvel in his heart.
The synthesis and measurement of high-pressure materials has always been a huge challenge for various laboratories.
In particular, it is very difficult to use diamond anvil cells to achieve ultra-high pressure technology.
Other top scientific research teams in the world have also encountered many problems when conducting similar experiments.
It is common for diamonds to be broken due to operational errors .
Compared with these problems of wasting resources, a more terrifying thing is that huge costs have been incurred but the experiment has not yet been successful.
If it is due to some force majeure factors, there is nothing to regret.
If it is due to problems such as poor technology or operational errors, it is indeed hard to explain.
During the lunch break, Xu You went out of his way to find Lin Shi.
"What's wrong, Teacher Xu?"
"Nothing, I just wanted to praise you. The experiment was really well done. Especially the use of diamond anvils, which has at least reached the top domestic level."
Lin Shi felt flattered to be praised by Xu You in person.
"Did I hear correctly? I was praised by Teacher Xu? Wait a minute... Teacher, you don't have anything else to criticize me for, do you?"
"In your mind, am I a person who likes to criticize students?" Xu You said with a wry smile.
"No, no, I'm just not used to being praised by you. I feel like I'm not that good yet."
"Don't be so unconfident. You should be praised when it's due. If it weren't for your high operational accuracy, the project wouldn't have progressed so quickly."
"Hehe, the main reason is that I really feel sorry for those diamonds. If I break a pair, it will be 20,000 yuan. I must be extra careful."
Xu You knew that Lin Shi was extremely talented and was one of the top students in Jijing University, which was full of talented people.
But compared with real geniuses like Lou Song and Nie Jie, Lin Shi is still inferior.
What impressed Xu You the most was not Lin Shi’s talent, but Lin Shi’s fighting spirit.
As early as when Xu You and Lin Shi first met, when they were studying competition together.
Lin Shi did not feel discouraged by Xu You's excellent grades. Instead, she faced the challenge head-on and took the initiative to sit in the seat next to Xu You.
For no other reason than to compete with the best students.
Xu You still remembers that when Lin Shi first participated in the experimental training, his experimental operation techniques were very clumsy.
Unexpectedly, over the past few years, Lin Shi has made great progress in experimental operations.
If he continues like this, Lin Shi will most likely become a physicist who goes down in history.
After a period of intense experiments.
The project team summarized the unified laws of room-temperature superconductors under these ultra-high pressures.
"Under ultra-high pressures ranging changes, causing their structure to undergo a phase transition. This gives these materials some special electronic structures and physical states," said Lin Shi.
Such changes do not require very low temperatures.
These changes can be achieved at room temperature as long as the pressure is high enough.
After summarizing these rules, Xu You came up with a new idea.
“Is it possible to make materials undergo similar changes without the help of ultra-high pressure? In other words, is it possible to create a material that has similar special properties under normal pressure?”
Xu You didn't know whether other scientists in the world had come up with this idea.
But at least in the various documents and materials Xu You has read, no scientist has ever put forward a similar hypothesis.
After determining this direction, Xu You began to think about specific solutions.
When studying high-temperature superconducting materials, Xu You once used a program he wrote to predict the superconducting properties of the materials.
These predictions are extremely accurate at lower temperatures, and even the superconducting critical temperature does not have much error.
But when approaching 210K, the error begins to become significantly larger.
