Historical research guide · 0057 · 2019
Piezoelectricity-induced High Temperature Superconductor
Salvatore Cezar Pais · US Department of Navy
In one minute
Salvatore Pais filed this application for the US Navy in 2019, continuing an earlier one on a room-temperature superconductor. Instead of hunting for a new material, he proposes doing something to an ordinary one. The wire is an insulator core — Teflon or a similar flexible polymer — carrying a coating about a micron thick, either aluminium or the piezoelectric ceramic PZT. Pulse a current through that coating while the wire is abruptly vibrated, Pais writes, like plucking a guitar string intermittently, and superconductivity should appear at 300 kelvin and above, with the supercurrent running along the boundary between coating and core. He then argues the case requirement by requirement: the vibration-generated field expels an applied field, giving the Meissner effect; the uncharged core means zero magnetic induction in the bulk, giving zero resistance; and Prigogine’s order-from-chaos conditions supply the macroscopic quantum coherence. He closes by reading the fine structure constant, written with the flux quantum, as a hint that the vacuum itself is a superconducting condensate.
Connection
Chapter 11 asks whether high-temperature superconductivity is a chemistry problem or a driving problem, and this Navy filing takes the second answer all the way — it specifies the wire, the coating thickness and the vibration that would test it. Its closing argument, that the fine structure constant points to a cosmic charged superfluid, is chapter 5’s picture of the vacuum arriving from the condensed-matter side.
From the source
High temperature superconductivity can be enabled not by the chemical structure of a new material but by what is done to an ordinary composite wire — a bulk insulator core with a thin normal-metal or piezoelectric coating on the order of the London penetration depth — which is abruptly vibrated while a pulsed current is passed through it, the supercurrent being generated along the coating/insulator interface.Abstract; Background; claims 1–2
Independent of whether the physical mechanism is Cooper pairing or bipolarons, the key to observed superconductivity is strong electron-lattice (phonon) coupling, and strong electron-lattice interactions can be obtained from abrupt, accelerated vibration of a wire.Description, on the mechanism of superconductivity
The Meissner condition written for the vibrated wire contains no temperature term and therefore no dependence on the critical temperature, so perfect diamagnetism becomes possible at high temperature; the driving parameter is the accelerated vibration frequency, which enters to the second power.Description, Equation 2
Decoherence can be retarded and possibly suppressed by accelerated spin or accelerated vibration of electrically charged matter under rapid acceleration transients — never letting the system relax to thermodynamic equilibrium — and under Prigogine’s three conditions the resulting chaotic soup of fluctuations self-organises into the macroscopic quantum coherence superconductivity requires.Description, on macroscopic quantum coherence and the Prigogine effect
Written in terms of the quantum of magnetic flux, the fine structure constant becomes a function of twice the electron charge, which Pais reads as evidence that electron pairing is fundamental to the composition of the universe and that the cosmic meta-structure may be a charged superfluid — a superconducting condensate.Description, Equation 3
Mitrano and colleagues report that exciting metallic K3C60 with mid-infrared optical pulses induces a large increase in carrier mobility accompanied by the opening of a gap in the optical conductivity, which Pais cites as experimental support that non-equilibrium driving, not chemistry alone, is what produces high-temperature superconductivity.Description, citing Nature 530, 461–464 (2016)
The way in
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190348597A1/enHow to cite it
Salvatore Cezar Pais, US Department of Navy (2019) Piezoelectricity-induced High Temperature Superconductor US20190348597A1