The fact this material is photosensitive is trying to tell us something. Notice it wasn't very high temperature? I liked the way the article put it, there is a competing order system adjacent to the superconductivity (paraphrasing here).

 

Yes, and it's gonna take millions of dollars of research grants and a good number of years to make heads or tails of it, let alone break it down into testable experimental materials if any can even be found. It's not photo sensitive, it's sensitive to extremely high energy pulses.

This is something I would honestly like to be called a complete ass about in a few years, but I don't suspect anything truly ground breaking in the near term (5-10 years) will come about in the super conductivity realm further than we've already come, which is no major loss, the current manufacturing and industrial usage of existing super conducting materials isn't even full efficient yet and it's already helping.

There will of course be tantalizing clues into the inner workings of the next generation of super conductors that will be ongoing, but it's going to be 10-20 years before anything beyond the current industry available materials are common place, if anything ever replaces them.

There are again no current theories or ideas or materials on even the distant horizon that can be said to be promising for room temperature super conductors of a practical nature in the next 5-10 years.

Unless someone trips over one MASSIVE ground breaking technology on accident between now and then it's going to be a long slow hill climb. Science is good at that though.

 

The number of years will have to sort themselves out, but I suspect that it is more like billions of dollars being spend on research. As I said before, the payout is huge, right up there with cheap nuclear fusion. It might even be the precursor of the latter.

 

Physicists unveil unexpected properties in superconducting material

 

Compact high-temperature superconducting cables demonstrated at NIST

 

Compact high-temperature superconducting cables demonstrated at NIST

77K is still not really high-temp but cooling with LN2 is pretty cheap.
Liquid Nitrogen, it's not just for cooking anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3VPeyYL-fI

 

Yeah, high temperature in that article is relative, still requires nitrogen or helium cooling. It being so compact though does make it a bit more practical, but not major technological leap.

 

Fleeting fluctuations in superconductivity disappear close to transition temperature

 

Now THAT is some promising science. I'd take maybe 10 years off my rough 50 year estimate for a possible candidate if anything positive ever pans out from that research. The raw collection of data alone is worth it's weight in gold. That's the kind of science where they go looking for something and some else flitting through the data in another field finds something completely different, pure research at it's best.

 

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-high-temperature-superconductor-secret-phase.html

 

Iron-pnictide electron orbital pairing promises higher-temperature superconductors

I'm not too happy with the data, lots of assertions but very few facts, but at least the research is moving.

 

Research will move for another hundred years or so, results if any will likely come from some other field. The bulk majority of 'discoveries' were not useful directly to the field they were found in.

Again as I stated previously, there is some future event, or discovery that will render the search for a true low temperature super conductor irrelevant, or it's benefits will be so great that it will overshadow the real aid..

The need of the moment is not the goal of science. It's the need of understanding, and in all the increasing knowledge of currently known and experimental super conductor materials, the wall has been hit for practicality.

I believe this type of research should still be funded, because the why is always paramount to effect, it might not matter to low temperature super conductors, but it will always aid raw scientific data.

 

You do realize they may have a near room temperature superconductor already? It is totally impractical, as it requires really high pressures to work. It is not verified either, far as I know.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921453404002746

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor

The evidence is far from in. The best hope as I see it is stable metallic hydrogen. It hasn't been created, although alloys have been. The theory is hydrogen has a theoretical crystal structure where it would be a true metal. If you look at the periodic chart it is first among metals, but has never lived up to its promise.

Another one mentioned in the Wiki articles puzzles me. A vacuum heated to billions of degrees could be a superconductor, but how does one heat use nothingness? Heat is vibration of matter on the atomic scale, and without matter, what is there to heat?

I've said it before, but a lot of people smarter than me and thee are spending big bucks on this, because the payoff is so huge. Unlike your earlier assertions stating that superconductivity is old hat the high temperature stuff is relatively new, it was discovered in 1986. They are still arguing about the mechanisms, which means there is more than one way to skin this cat, cooper pairs are not the only way.

So I will keep posting the articles as I see them, slow incremental advances are not a bad way to reach a goal.

 

Heat for particles in vacuum is usually measured in electron volts, and substantial electron volts are really really hot when measured in kelvins.
So that might be where their confusion arose.
Basically, they described a cathode ray tube, which could technically be a superconductor if enough voltage was applied.
I know a duterium atom under 75KEV will move at 780 Miles per second, maths can be done.

 

Another one mentioned in the Wiki articles puzzles me. A vacuum heated to billions of degrees could be a superconductor, but how does one heat use nothingness? Heat is vibration of matter on the atomic scale, and without matter, what is there to heat?

Due to that Evil Dr. Quantum there can be no perfect vacuum only Quantum soup.
http://dbg.citizendium.org/wiki/Vacuum_(quantum_electrodynamichttp://dbg.citizendium.org/wiki/Vacuum_(quantum_electrodynamic)

 

Still, how do you pump head into quantum flux? The particles pop in, the particle pop out from mutual annihilation. Where is the heat stored?

 

Did you see my post?
Heat inn the form of electron volts.

 

That sounds good, but think it through. Electron volts is a measurement of energy, like joules. What is storing the energy?

 

Still, how do you pump head into quantum flux? The particles pop in, the particle pop out from mutual annihilation. Where is the heat stored?

I guess you have to believe in ZPE and that vacuum can become matter when excited by energy that unbalances the matter/anti-matter pairs.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Kz38u2qT36kC&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

If I understand current theory correctly the temperature of space is a function of background radiation, which is somewhere around 3°K give or take. This implies to me that photons are the energy carriers in this definition.

Black holes can be said to have a temperature, basically a measurement of the Hawking radiation they give off. If it is more than the 3°K then they loose mass, abut very slowly. If it is less it absorbs radiation, and very slowly keeps on growing.

In this sense vacuum can be said to have a temperature.