Superconductivity - Blog Posts
Look I'm just not calm about the nebulous possibilities of superconductors. Whether the work of the team out of South Korea is or is not all they claim, I'm just really excited for the potential to see such a monumental breakthrough in my time. To see how it gets incorporated, to see new versions of familiar technology touting LK-99 as a component even when it doesn't actually improve that particular item much. I want to see the world all excited about the same thing, even a little.
Bismuth is one of the weirdest-looking elements on the Periodic Table, but its internal properties just got even stranger. Scientists have discovered that at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15°C), bismuth becomes a superconductor - a material that can conduct electricity without resistance.
According to the current theory of superconductivity, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because for 40 years now, scientists have assumed that superconducting materials must be abundant in free-flowing mobile electrons. But in bismuth, there’s just one mobile electron for every 100,000 atoms.
“In general, compounds that exhibit superconductivity have roughly one mobile electron per atom,” Srinivasan Ramakrishnan from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India explained to Chemistry World.
“However, in bismuth, one mobile electron is shared by 100,000 atoms – since [the] carrier density is so small, people did not believe bismuth will superconduct.”
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