I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn't newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It's absolutely dripping with kook signifiers.
The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm are:
1) I've clicked around a bit, and there don't seem to be any links on the site to any external page. They have a whole set of claims of dramatic breakthroughs in the transition temperature for their superconducting materials, a new one every couple of months, but no links to research papers, or other labs, or the arxiv. It's just a collection of nested press releases.
2) The following paragraph, specifically the final sentence:
The volume fraction of this material is very low. Before commercialization is possible, a refinement method will need to be developed to increase the VF. As a result of a low VF, numerous R-T and magnetization tests may be necessary to see the respective transitions above the noise. This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research.
(the italics are standing in for an ugly yellow highlight in the original). This just screams "kook" to me-- I'm surprised that it's not followed by a solicitation of contributions to fund the research.
I could be way wrong, here. There could be some honest explanation for why there are no papers on the arxiv about this (at least, searching for authors named "Eck" (the only name I see on those pages) containing the word "thallium" (the key to their material) doesn't turn up anything). It's possible that the person or people behind this really are unjustly neglected geniuses producing real results in isolation.
But I wouldn't bet any money on that, if I were you.
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This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research.
There are two kinds of people who would write a sentence like that about something as potentially ground-breaking as what's being claimed here. He could be a crackpot, or he could be a fraudster. If he really were a lone genius, he would at least go through the motions of filing a patent--perhaps he has already done so and the Patent Office has rejected his application, as it does for perpetual motion machines and similar nonsense.
I put a link to this too but I'm wondering whether perhaps I shouldn't have - the less exposure this kind of thing gets the better. I've seen a couple of non-sarcastic/non-questioning repostings of this on 'science news' sites which is a bit of a shame. (Although a colleague of mine did use this in a recent superconductivity lecture on as an example to the students not to trust everything on the internet!)
Graagh!
This one is really making the rounds, isn't it? I just took J Storrs Hall to task for this a few days ago for mindlessly repeating it on nanodot.org. I had actually considered ailing you about it, asking if it was as goofy as it sounded, before deciding that, no, I'm competent enough to judge the kookery there all by myself without even being a cryophysicist.
There's no evidence of any peer review at all. There's an incredibly bare-bones description of an experiment and a method, with just enough technobabble to satisfy Charlie Storss^W Star Trek writers. There's a plot that I could make with Excel and a high school understanding of noise addition. Eck also appears to believe that superconducting materials in space can explain the increasing expansion rate of the universe. (Through strong diamagnetism!)
My guess is that this one got picked up by "The Next Big Future" website and-- for reasons I can't fathom-- even otherwise respectable science commentators took it seriously. (NBF, by the way, also breathlessly reports every pseudo-advance claimed by DWave quantum computation, every breakthrough on Mach/Woodward effect propulsion reported by Paul march, and several other complete weirdities.) From there, it went viral because people read the commentaries in a completely uncritical fashion.
"There's no evidence of any peer review at all."
Particularly if you don't look all that hard - not that he makes it all the easy to find, or that there is a lot. But for one of his YBCO varients, there is a paper confirming superconductivity in that compound.
http://www.superconductors.org/SDARTICL.pdf
I will agree that his charts and description lack - but contrary opinions on patents do not automatically make one a kook.
"There's no evidence of any peer review at all."
Particularly if you don't look all that hard - not that he makes it all the easy to find, or that there is a lot. But for one of his YBCO varients, there is a paper confirming superconductivity in that compound.
A paper that, interestingly, doesn't make any obvious mention of him, or the site. Of course, it's not easy to determine who is really producing the discoveries attributed to "Superconductors.ORG" from the blurbs on the site. I'm also not really qualified to evaluate that paper-- Physica C seems like an odd choice for such a significant announcement. I would expect that a 20K jump in transition temperature would rate at least Phys. Rev. Letters, if not Science or Nature, but maybe Physica C is the standard place such things appear. Maybe.
Particularly if you don't look all that hard - not that he makes it all the easy to find, or that there is a lot.
Or that his name is ever mentioned in the papers that are actually peer reviewed. (I did actually check.) Other peoples' work is peer reviewed-- his doesn't seem to be.
Look, I'd be more than pleased to be wrong about this, but the guy hosts reprints of Podkletnov papers. He's also making truly extraordinary claims. Skepticism is warranted, as is criticism of the uncritical acceptance with which his work has been recently reported.
Question for the solid-state experimentalists. How do the front-page data look? He seems to be showing that there's a tiny drop in resistivity (and a tiny increase in magnetization) at a certain temperature. Is that the normal evidence for this sort of claim?
Extra kook warning: the site links credulously to the Mark Goldes web page at "ultraconductors.org" (now dead) advertising room-temperature superconductivity in plastics. This was Goldes' side venture from his main line of work building perpetual motion machines (or at least perpetual motion machine press releases and calls for investors) with Magnetic Power, Inc.
Thanks for bringing this up!
I came across this web site a few months ago when preparing a post on a curious (and, in my opinion, ill-concieved) empirical formula relating the transition temperature of high-temperature superconductors to their lattice structure. Although the site has a few nice pages about the history and basic concepts of superconductivity, I decided not to link to it, because of the outrageous claims on the "News" page.
Let's face it: If there was indeed "Superconductivity at Dry Ice Temperatures" (194.7 K, or -78°C, claimed in July 2008), how comes that one has never heard about this? I mean, it would take a lot of fun from high-T superconductor demonstration experiments because one could dispense with liquid air, but it would be a technological milestone, even if the superconducting substance was not very practical to handle.
Actually, the claims of the site are mentioned on the Wikipedia page on high-temperature superconductivity: "Occasionally reports are made of [...] tiny signals suggestive of superconductivity above 200 K. [...] Neither of these materials have been found to exhibit bulk superconductivity by a large number of independent groups, unlike those listed above."
BTW, according to the Wikipedia page, the highest reproducibly measured superconducting transition temperature so far is at 138 K in a Hg-Tl-Ba-Ca-cuprate compound, a record now 15 years old. And for the classical YBCO compounds, Wikipedia quotes a record temperature of 92 K, which is now cut by the data published in the the Physica C paper, claiming a transition temperature of 102 K.
My impression is that the guy running the web site may be fooling himself.
My guess is that the signals on the plots which he claims show the onset of superconductivity, if not just noise, are caused by something else. I mean, the substances he is dealing with have a complicated structure, and even if there are some peaks and spikes in his data, this could be caused by other effects, maybe magnetic or structural transitions.
It would indeed be good if some solid-state physicist with more expertise in this could comment on the methods he is using to characterise the claimed "superconducting" transitions.
Ultraconductors(tm) have been the subject of four completed SBIR Contracts; a Phase I and Phase II with the USAF; and a pair with what is now called the Missile Defense Agency.
Fractal Systems independently created almost 1,000 samples for the USAF.
They have been the subject of articles in the Journal of Superconductivity, as well as Physica C, and Philosophical Research B - the latter is the oldest scientific journal in North America.
They have been independently replicated at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia - which published papers stating they have zero resistance. Their work included a four point probe experiment. Also, at the Bar Ilan University where they demonstrated no loss of conductivity in a magnetic field of 9 Tesla.
The work of Room Temperature Superconductors Inc., and its parent firm, Magnetic Power Inc., is now part of Chava Energy. www.chavaenergy.com
Those who believe we make claims of perpetual motion might enjoy the article: Perpetual Commotion, on the Chava website.
I've been following his website for many years, but just from the end of 2007 he's been claiming such high temperature records. From what I understand, these superconductors are not capable of showing the spectacular Meissner at a macroscopic level simply because they are just microscopic parts diluted in a big solid, so they just tiny jumps. I really don't know if the guy is a crank or not. But I am sure of 2 things:
1. He applies patents for nearly everything. I guess if one were to freely use the composite described in the article, one would still have to pay him royalties because it is made on methods he applied to before.
2. 254K is not by any means the highest critical temperature claimed on the website. The prize goes to a claim of a theoretical prediction of superconduction on carbon nanotubes at a temperature of 700k-1200k.
http://www.superconductors.org/roomnano.htm
Before just saying the guy is kook, http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/gzhao2/publications2.html
He posts most of his Phys. Rev. B, and sometimes he manages to publish on Phys. Rev. Lett. and twice on Nature.
PS.: Eck's records go up to 2005, but inflationed considerably beginning in 2008.
PS2.: This super high temperature superconductors paper records were probably refused by Nature and Phys. Rev. Lett., but he keeps a production of high quality papers.
Wow, still around after all these years, Mark. Amazing.
I myself did the practical thing, I got into ARPES, light sources, spectroscopy and rocket science. Plus there are now also cold atomic gas experiments galore producing a wealth of coherent data on what to expect in a BCS-BOSE transition, with a quantum critical point or two hidden under the superconducting dome. And who needs a dome anyways, let's just go for a straight insulator superconductor transition.
Super recent, as in tonight :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.0197
It appears even now that the traditional metallic BCS superconductors aren't so ordinary and homogeneous with just very mildly strong electronic correlations. Curiouser and curiouser. I advise keeping your eyes on the kooks, just in case. They might be giants.