Laborious Labview and Novel Superconductors

So this post will work two-fold, a quick rant about how I hate that I love LabView.
If you don't know LabView is a visual programming language designed to interface most hardware and software in the Lab and make it work. Now I find LabView is similar to Marmite in many ways - You either love it or hate it.

I for one can live with its short comings to some extent, but there are so many times where I want to punch the personification of LabView in the stupid smug money grabbing face.
I guess I'm saying I love LabView, but like many guests on the Jeremy Kyle show, I say i'll leave it, I'll move on with my life, but I'll come crawling back to its abuse and torment.
After that ringing endorsement, why not try it, free downloads are available and you can make it work wonders if you persist.

MOVING ON!

THE NEWS IN SCIENCE

Superconductivity was discovered back in about 1911 and is an interesting effect in where the resistance of a material becomes zero, the power of this is immense, the ability  to have a superconducting material to carry electricity with no loss or generation of heat WILL change the world. Unfortunately to make materials superconducting we need to lower its temperature to about the temperature of space ( approx 2 Kelvin). There are many publications on how superconductors work and the physical mechanism is well understood by those crazy people that call themselves scientists (and Wikipedia).

We also have HIGH TEMP SUPERCONDUCTORS. These are materials made up of different elements in certain ratios that become superconducting at higher temperatures, by higher I mean in the order of -200 degrees C (quite warm in comparison to space). These also have interesting effects (see below)

LOOK MA NO HANDS!
This is a demonstration of the Meissner effect, where the superconductor expels all magnetic field lines from Mr.Magnet floating above it. The magnet proceeds to get 'trapped' in these field lines and sort of sits on them and hangs between them whilst the material remains superconducting.

The interesting thing about these high temperature superconductors (or SCs as I'll call them as am lazy) is that we don't really know how these work, we know they form Cooper Pairs which causes the resistance to go to zero, but how these cooper pairs are formed (shrugs we don't know)....or do we








Well, in the last 30 something years people have sort to answer the question, how are these formed? There are theories, something about magnetic forces between heavy atoms that make up these SCs. Finally, some people reckon they've experimentally verified the idea, their work published here:

CLICK ME FOR GLORY

I want to write more and wrap up, but my supervisor just walked in.

BACK TO LABVIEW AND SCIENCE!

PhD work

''Do a PhD'' I said, ''It'll be easy'' I said, hah, what was I thinking. Despite this PhD-malarkey being far more complex than I first anticipated I'm actually enjoying it. SHOCKING.

Yes, it's difficult to get experiments working and yes everything that can go wrong usually does, but it's all worth it, for the single moment of when something does work you can stand back and say ''I did that, me, no one else'' I guess this is something anyone can say about their own work, but I guess that's the point, it's your own work, so be proud of it. That's what I'm trying to do at least.

See look, I made a thing to the left... It's not really much, but it's a thing I made and tells a story.

What is that story I hear you ask?

Well let me explain.

This is the basis of my whole PhD, making a nanotube, a template for generating wires within these tubes, and I find it interesting. To me this is important, I want to generate wires within these tubes, confining the growth of a crystal structure can lead to changes in the structure of the material giving it new properties from the bulk. These quantum confined wires have a diamter on the order of the unit cell, that's just a couple of atoms across, so right at the limit of what's possible.  

Graphene

Graphene is something i should know a fair bit about, as it is my project at the moment.

Graphene is derived from graphite (the stuff you fin in pencils) which is a carbon lattice made of many layers bonded together. Graphene is but one of these many layers, meaning graphene is actually a sheet of carbon that is 1 atom thick !! 

It was discovered back in 2004 when some guy from Manchester used cello tape on graphite. To me it seems surprising it was not discovered abit before 2004 :P

Anyway, what is the use of it:

Well graphene has unique electrical properties, aswell as mechanical properties. My main research field is utilising the fact that electrons in graphene undergo 'ballistic transport' - and the fact that electrons behave as massless particles. In abit more simple terms - the as electrons travel through ordinary stuff, they bounce off and scatter and interact with the thing it's traveling through..... get it ?

BUT !

In graphene the electrons do not interact with the graphene sheet, they just travel through it without scattering, bouncing or anything. This means that electrons traveling through graphene sheets can be technically used to carry quantum information. You see the problem with quantum information is as soon as you look at something quantum or measure it (or put something in the way) you lose the information - bummer.  Since electrons don;'t interact with graphene you don't lose the information. In afew years when research takes off abit more it means that graphene will be the candidate for making quantum computers and replacing standard Silicon chips.

Pretty cool stuff

Spen