• Question: How far away from a super conductor that works at room temperature are we?

    Asked by markjdd to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Vicky Bayliss

      Vicky Bayliss answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Good question.

      They only discovered superconductivity as a property relatively recently, Wikipedia says 1911. And people are currently looking at what they call ‘high temperature superconductors’ – but they only mean the temperature is high compared to conventional superconductors. So far, most superconductors used operate at 4K, but high temperature superconductors can work at about 70K – but in real terms that’s still 200 degrees below room temperature. I’m not aware of anyone trying to develop room temperature superconductors, but I may be wrong.

    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Yeah many of my colleagues work on either modelling or trying to build ‘high-temperature superconductors’ and what they mean by that is what Vicky said — superconductivity around 70 Kelvin (K)!

      At the conference I was at 2 weeks ago in Wuerzburg in Germany, a lot of people were trying to calculate the phase diagram of copper-based superconductors, because there’s evidence they might work up to 100K (-173.2 degrees C).

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      According to wikipedia there are evidences of superconductivity to as high as -135 C. Not sure we will ever be able to get to something working at “room” temperature although that would be super cool!

    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      I don’t think we will ever get anything to work at room temperature… at least not in the near future anyway 🙁

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