What is ybco superconductor

Many fundamental questions are unanswered, particularly the mechanism by which high-Tc superconductivity occurs.

More broadly, the cuprates are in a class of solids with strong electron-electron interactions. An understanding of such 'strongly correlated' solids is perhaps the major unsolved problem of condensed matter physics with over ten thousand researchers working on this topic.

High-Tc superconductors also have significant potential for applications in technologies ranging from electric power generation and transmission to digital electronics. This ability to carry large amounts of current can be applied to electric power devices such as motors and generators, and to electricity transmission in power lines.

For example, superconductors can carry as much as times the amount of electricity of ordinary copper or aluminium wires of the same size. This material, a famous 'high-temperature superconductor', achieved prominence because it was the first material to superconduct above the boiling point of nitrogen.

The significance of the discovery of YBCO is the breakthrough in the refrigerant used to cool the material to below the critical temperature. Have doubts regarding this product? Post your question. Safe and Secure Payments. That was until the mids, some 70 years after Onnes. OK, so still not very useful, but a huge leap over the previous best. The race was on. Labs across the world started to throw different metals into the mix with the crucial copper oxide, and the critical temperature crept up and up.

Enter YBCO. This mixture of yttrium, barium, copper and oxygen can be teased into forming a compound with a critical temperature of 93K.

And nitrogen is a lot cheaper than helium. Superconductivity was now within reach of the masses. And YBCO is very straight-forward to make — I even managed to make some that superconducted when I was an undergraduate, back in the last century. All you need to do is grind together yttrium oxide, barium carbonate and copper oxide so that you have a 1 to 2 to 3 ratio of yttrium to barium to copper.

Because the carbon from the barium carbonate leaves the mixture as carbon dioxide, you lose some oxygen atoms. Letting the sample cool slowly inside the furnace allows extra oxygen from the atmosphere to creep back in.

Its structure comprises sheets of copper and oxygen atoms, as do all the cuprate superconductors, interleaved with sheets of barium oxide and yttrium atoms. The unit cell actually has space for nine oxygen atoms, but you end up with around seven of them and a few gaps. Because superconductivity is all about electrons pairing up to whizz effortlessly through a material, those electrons are paired so well that the material is perfectly diamagnetic.

So that is how, after I had tied my pellet to a bit of thread and dunked it in a polystyrene cup of liquid nitrogen, I could watch it swing towards the gap between the poles of a powerful magnet, only to bounce away before it got there, like it was hitting an invisible barrier.

It just refused to go in between the poles, until it had warmed up and became non-superconducting again. So superconductors, with their amazing promise, are still trapped in a world cooled by liquid nitrogen. Next week, things get a little toxic. In rainy Britain, garden flowers are often a much better indicator of the time of year than the weather. The flowers, leaves, roots and seeds of the foxglove are all highly poisonous. They are full of compounds called glycosides — which contain a steroid bonded to a sugar — including the deadly cardiac glycoside digoxin, which wreaks havoc on the heart.

Ligand tames barium, making precursor to first barium—tin and first molecular barium—fluorine bond. Rare experimental evidence of direct metal—metal bonding between the often-overlooked rare earth elements. A DNA researcher tells the story of how humans have shaped the evolution of living things on Earth. Site powered by Webvision Cloud. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Related audio. Neil Withers recalls making this groundbreaking superconductor as a student.

Meera Senthilingam This week, get ready to conduct in a superior manner. Showing us how is Neil Withers… Neil Withers The story of yttrium barium copper oxide — YBCO for short — is the story of superconductivity, which goes back over years to