The D-Wave One system consists of a superconducting 128-qubit chip in a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter room.
The D-Wave computer operates as an adiabatic quantum computer, and consists of a superconducting 128-qubit chip in a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter room.
Shorter, experimental segments have already been tried elsewhere, but the significance of the Albany project is that it will be using superconducting cables in a completely commercial environment.
Researchers at the University of Toronto used everyday Scotch Tape (or double-sided poster tape, specifically) to bestow a semiconductor with superconducting properties.
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American Superconductor and its competitors are also engaged in a race to make superconducting tape that could be used to carry power on the grid itself.
The real advantage is that the lack of resistance means that a given thickness of superconducting cable can carry between two and ten times as much power as the same thickness of copper.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle accelerator, uses a staggering 1, 200 tonnes of superconducting wire, similar to the sort used in MRI, in order to speed protons up to within a whisker of the speed of light and to collide them inside vast detectors, themselves stuffed with several hundred tonnes of superconducting materials.
In a recent test on a commercial network, using superconducting filters increased that network's capacity by half.
The US Department of Energy has underwritten more than a dozen demonstration projects using superconducting magnets, cables and wires, all directed towards more efficient and compact generation and use of electricity.
They are toughened with diamond-like carbon from the semiconductor industry and this is bonded on to the steel with niobium, a rare tin alloy normally used in superconducting magnets.
The idea of using a magnetic field as a solar sail was first suggested a few years ago, but it soon became apparent that creating a field strong enough to be useful would require exotic superconducting materials that, unfortunately, do not exist.
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Superconductor Technologies, a company based in Santa Barbara, California, is building superconducting filters for mobile-phone base stations.
Siemens, a German engineering giant and a leading maker of such devices, has seen demand for superconducting MRI machines grow at the expense of the non-superconducting sort.
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