You wake up after a huge house party, bottles and glasses litter the tables, chairs, floor, hamster cage (where is my hamster anyway?). You face the fact that you need to clean up the mess, despite a throbbing headache. You smell the stale whiff of alcoholic beverages filling the room. Your stomach churns.
But before you stumble around in your underwear, quickly pouring the dregs down the sink, wait! Save it! Those dregs (minus the odd floating cigarette butts) could be useful in the pursuit of fabricating high temperature superconductors!
This might sound like some kind of odd frat house experiment, but Yoshihiko Takano of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, decided it might be interesting to soak samples of a potential superconductor in hot alcoholic drinks after attending a party.
Be under no illusion, Takano is the first to admit that he's mixing business with pleasure -- by his own admission, he "likes alcohol very much."
The partying scientist and his team made a surprising discovery after boiling several varieties of alcoholic drinks overnight: the superconducting properties of the samples improved over the conventional boiling pure water/ethanol mix.
The Japanese researchers used samples of FeTe0.8S0.2 (containing iron, tellurium and tellurium sulfide), but once prepared, the material only becomes superconducting when exposed to water or oxygen.
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This is where Takano's logic of dropping samples into left-over alcoholic drinks -- including beer, red wine, white wine, sake, shochu and whisky -- becomes clear. By his reckoning, drinks like beer and wine oxidize easily. Perhaps they're acting as a catalyst, supplying more oxygen to the FeTe0.8S0.2 samples thus making them more efficient superconductors.
But which alcoholic beverage performed as the best substance to dunk potential superconductors in? Red wine was the clear winner.
Currently, superconducting materials need to be cooled to extremely low temperatures before they exhibit the flow of electricity with zero resistance. Finding a superconductor that can operate at higher temperatures -- say room temperature -- would open up a huge variety of applications. Perhaps using a wine catalyst to oxidize FeTe0.8S0.2 is a step (albeit an unorthodox one) in the right direction.
Source: Physorg.com -- special thanks to my mate Dan Le Messurier for finding the science-alcohol link and bringing it to my attention!
Image credit: Timothy Hogan/Corbis
Tags: Drinks, Materials, Materials Science
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