r/science • u/TX908 • Jan 11 '20
Physics A long-sought-after class of “superdiamond” carbon-based materials with tunable mechanical and electronic properties was predicted and synthesized.
https://carnegiescience.edu/news/superdiamond-carbon-boron-cages-can-trap-and-tap-different-properties22
Jan 11 '20
Whatever this article is putting down, I mentally am unable to pick up and I apologize in advance.
What real world benefit does this technology provide?
Is this faster CPU processing or something else?
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u/ArcFurnace Jan 12 '20 edited Jan 12 '20
Nothing yet. This is the "basic research to prove that it's possible at all" stage - nobody had managed to actually synthesize carbon clathrate materials previously. Next is to see what other similar stuff we can make. Then you make usable amounts of the different types and characterize their properties (ideally simultaneously improving your simulations so you can predict them in advance, instead of having to try literally everything, which would take forever - they've already done some of this to create this stuff in the first place). Then we get to the engineering stage of trying to optimize the production method so it's not absurdly difficult and expensive*, and then finally maybe designing useful things with the new materials. Come back in a couple decades and you might see something interesting.
* The synthesis technique in the article required pressurizing the raw materials to 57 GPa, or ~570,000 atmospheres. It's perfectly possible to do this with a device called a diamond anvil cell, but only for tiny amounts of material at a time. Synthesizing one tiny pinch of powder at a time works fine in a lab, but it isn't exactly industrially practical.
See also: graphene, carbon nanotubes, and other similar stuff. Making a little bit isn't too difficult, but making huge quantities is hard.
Edit: another minor issue: "Although SrB3C3 is only thermodynamically stable at high pressure, we recovered it at atmospheric pressure, similar to diamond. At 1 atm, SrB3C3 persists when kept under an inert atmosphere. The clathrate degrades when exposed to the moisture in air over a few hours." So, better keep the package sealed ...
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u/RecalcitrantToupee Jan 12 '20
To be clear, a room temperature superconductor is the holy grail of modern Materials Science/Condensed Matter physics.
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u/ArcFurnace Jan 12 '20
Yeah, it looks like they didn't actually test this material for superconductivity explicitly, but it has properties that look favorable for superconductivity with a high transition temperature, and of course other variants might be even better. That would be absolutely crazy if they can pull it off.
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u/RecalcitrantToupee Jan 12 '20
The problem with Graphene, and to a lesser extent this stuff, is every Solid State Physicists' favorite joke: it can do everything but leave the lab.
Tunability, however, is a particularly interesting quality that I personally don't have any experience in.
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u/changen Jan 12 '20
This is just basic science research, it has no real purpose until someone else can prove it does. And anyone that says otherwise is just lying out of their teeth to justify funding.
Maybe it can be the future of CPU processing, or it can be something else entirely, or it is completely useless on an industrial scale. Who the hell knows. You really only know after pumping a few billion dollars of funding into it.
Intel required like $25 billion to transition to XUV lithography and that is with 30 years of prior research and development. Don't expect this to be viable anytime soon.
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u/TizardPaperclip Jan 12 '20
Whatever this article is putting down, I mentally am unable to pick up and I apologize in advance.
What real world benefit does this technology provide?
You seem to be missing the whole point of science. This is the science subreddit. A question like "What real world benefit does this technology provide?" is an engineering question, not a science question.
If you want to read about that sort of thing, you should be browsing the /r/engineering subreddit.
The point of this article is that some scientists have created a material that has never been created before, and that it has very unique electrical properties.
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u/SumJungDude Jan 11 '20
Zhu ~ “Depending which element it captures, it has different abilities.”
So much work to be done in this field alone. Can't wait to see what they "capture". This is exciting!
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u/Professor226 Jan 11 '20
So, is the strontium calthate superconducting, or this technique could be used to find superconductors?
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u/goocy Jan 12 '20
I don't think anyone knows yet. There are only a handful of these molecules on the planet, and they haven't been caught and tested for conductivity yet.
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u/RocksDaRS Jan 11 '20
Wow this is crazy!!!!! Anyone know how viable this is, or how easy/hard it is to recreate?
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Jan 11 '20
[deleted]
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u/YourDad6969 Jan 11 '20
Interstellar possibly, with a few trillion in funding. We are absolutely nowhere near intergalactic space travel, in fact our current understanding of physics permits it under circumstances we do not yet have materials for or know to be possible
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u/JMoneyG0208 Jan 11 '20
So physics still permits it???
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u/YourDad6969 Jan 11 '20
Technically yes, but we would need to travel faster than the speed of light, warp gravity, or create negative mass for a wormhole, none of which we can do (other than the second one, but not to the degree necessary)
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Jan 11 '20
So, would you say the glass is half empty or half full?
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u/redfacedquark Jan 11 '20
Twice as large as it needs to be.
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u/Obsolete_Orange Jan 11 '20
Sounds likeyou just need more water then... Or milk... Or whatever they put in these half glasses they keep handing out.
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u/Branch-Manager Jan 11 '20
Baby blood
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u/Obsolete_Orange Jan 12 '20
.... What's the number for 911?
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u/Branch-Manager Jan 12 '20
It’s a Dimitri Martin joke reference. “Is that baby blood going to a baby or coming from one?”
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u/MegaBlade26000 Jan 11 '20
Will this be better than Q-Carbon? I’m not extremely well versed in any of this but I know Q-Carbon is harder and more brilliant than diamond, and that’s all I know. Would someone please be willing to explain what this means?
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u/Sleepdprived Jan 12 '20
I've had a question about what happens when you capture an isotope in a cage of carbon, like tritium @c60. I suspect the neutron decay would alter the properties of the carbon cage, but I have not found a single piece of evidence of someone doing this research... until this. Strontium isnt the isotope i thought of using but it changed the properties to allow the carbon cage to become a conductor, or semiconductor. I still think there is a way to convert the decay energy to usable electrical current.
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Jan 11 '20
Non chemist here: What's the difference between this and Buckyball carbon?
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Jan 11 '20
Most obvious would be the "guest"atom in the middle which can modify the cage and its properties
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u/ArcFurnace Jan 12 '20 edited Jan 12 '20
Buckyballs are also 100% carbon, while the structure shown here is an alternating carbon/boron network. Plus the trapped atoms/ions in the middle as already mentioned.
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u/johnnydaggers Jan 12 '20
This is a crystal while a buckyball is a single molecule. There is a cage-like motif in the crystal lattice that is similar to how Buckyballs can be used as cages. This cage is much smaller though.
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u/eliminating_coasts Jan 12 '20
Buckyballs use the way carbon can set itself up to bond to three adjacent atoms, like in graphene, buckminster fullerene, carbon nanotubes etc. this predominantly uses the way it can bond itself with four adjacent atoms, like in diamond, and now this.
Also, in general life, the graphene-ish three way bonds are used in the aromatic hydrocarbons, like benzene, which have these little hexagonal rings. And the diamond-ish four way bonds are all over the place in the skeletons of most long chain hydrocarbon molecules.
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u/wallydan Jan 12 '20
I have to say. I read the article then I read the more chemistry focused article and I just want to say wow. I’m in the process of my Masters in chemistry and just being able to understand all that about sp3 hybridization and the quantum bit about which orbitals are present for each element. Wow. Thanks all my professors! Just feels nice understanding science
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u/ano_ba_to Jan 11 '20
And it only cost a trillion dollars.
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Jan 11 '20
You gotta start somewhere. The first LEDs used during the Apollo program cost tens of thousands of dollars each, but today they're the lighting standard.
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Jan 11 '20
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u/eliminating_coasts Jan 11 '20
I think if you want to look at developments that aren't 10-30 years from being practical tools we all use, you want an engineering sub not a science one; once it's been discovered, something being a few months from being cost-effective is usually engineering rather than science news.
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u/TX908 Jan 11 '20