Munuswamy Venkatesan
Dublin (IRL)
Role(s):
Associate/Staff
STREP
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Startup
Location:
Dublin
Industry:
Energy
Year Founded:
2006
Number Employees:
1-10 people
Description:
Researchers in Japan and China have discovered a new family of high-temperature superconductors--materials that conduct electricity without any resistance at inexplicably high temperatures, useful for applications such as superconducting power lines.
For more than 20 years, the only known superconductors that worked far above liquid-helium temperatures were a few dozen compounds—virtually all based on copper. Now scientists have discovered the first high-temperature superconductors based on iron. These novel materials could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries in science—how exactly the high-temperature versions work.
In superconductors electric current flows completely without resistance. For decades, the phenomenon was thought to occur only near absolute zero. The cold tames the vibrations of the atoms making up the substance in such a way that electrons can overcome their natural repulsion for one another. The altered vibrations, called phonons, cause the electrons to pair up; so coupled, they can then move freely through the atomic lattice.