Superconductivity at room temperature??

[sol invictus]

Thank's Sol, so electric potential is a force and not an energy?

No, it's not that either - it's what I said, an energy/charge. There isn't an English name for a quantity with those units (like "energy" or "force" or "distance") other than "electric potential" or "voltage".

 

[Skwinty]

Thank's Sol.

So Johan is correct when he states

"Electric potential is NOT a force: Only its gradient is a force per unit charge; which is the electric field."

 

[johanfprins]

Johan,

I don't know that I have ever seen a science textbook use all capital letters and bold to get its factual point across. Your hypothesis about superconductivity does not rest upon the font used. I understand frustration happens, but you are letting it get in the way of your ability to present evidence. Please stop calling people liars in the majority of your posts. In the immortal words of Phil Plait, DBAD.

CT

When a person lies, what must I call him? I will try not to use capital fonts anymore.

 

[johanfprins]

Statement 1: When creating an interface between an n-type semiconductor and a metal, where the latter has a Fermi level at a lower energy than the n-type semiconductor, and when neither of the two materials are charged up before generating the interface, then, after creating the interface, a dipole layer forms across the interface, since negative charge-carriers move across the interface from the n-type semiconductor into the metal, thus leaving a positively charged depletion-layer behind (in contact with the interface), and forming a negatively charged layer (in contact with the interface) by accumulation within the metal.

Statement 2: If the density of donors within the n-type semiconductor is sufficiently high an equilibrium dipole will manifest when the Fermi-level at the metal-dipole interface has the same energy as the Fermi-level at the semiconductor-dipole interface. Yes or no?

Statement 3: When reverse-biasing the Schottky barrier, the Fermi-level on the metal side is pulled down in energy relative to the Fermi-level on the n-type semiconductor side: If the donor density is high enough, the dipole width will at first increase to also eliminate this offset in Fermi-levels. No normal current can thus flow through the dipole since there is no net electric-field within the dipole. By further increasing the reverse bias, a situation will be reached at which the dipole cannot adjust anymore to keep the Fermi-levels at the same energy: An electric-field will then appear within the dipole and eventually a breakdown current will flow through the dipole.

Statement 4: The voltage at which reverse breakdown occurs is determined by the density of the donors so that there are different types of breakdown: i.e.
(i) Low donor density: Dielectric breakdown: AKA avalanche breakdown.
(ii) Intermediate donor density: Zener breakdown where at the breakdown voltage electrons start to tunnel through the depletion layer.
(iii) Very high donor density: Immediate breakdown by Zener tunnelling; since even though the dipole can adapt to align the Fermi-levels, the dipole layer is so thin that charge-carriers immediately start to tunnel through the dipole-layer. It is said that an "ohmic-contact" has formed to the n-type semiconductor.

Statement 5: It is an experimental fact that one can modify the surface of a diamond substrate to have negative electron affinity (NEA): This means that without charge-carriers within the conduction band, the conduction band is at a higher energy than the vacuum energy-level for an electron outside the diamond. By injecting an electron (oops one cannot inject an electron but only a negatively charged wave-packet) into the conduction band near such a surface (using photo excitation for example), the charge-carrier will be at a higher energy than it will be outside the surface as an electron in the vacuum.

 

[ben m]

I know that this is the Copenhagen interpretation of the Schroedinger's wave function:

And the statistical interpretation. And the many-worlds interpretation. And the ensemble interpretation. Remember, Johan, all of these "interpretations" were engineered to give exactly the same answers. (That's why they remain interpretations rather than testable theories of which one has been proven right and the others wrong.)

When I say you are wrong about the energetics of an electron escaping from a metal contact, I mean you're wrong according to Schrodinger's equation itself---the time-dependent wave equation alone. You're wrong already long before we think about wavefunction collapse, wave-particle duality, and so on.

You are using "oh, that's just Copenhagen" as an excuse for anything you say that disagrees with standard quantum mechanics. It's like a middle-school arithmetic student, who fails a quiz after writing 1+1=3, who tries to bluff his way out of it by saying "teacher, you're wrong, you're thinking in Base 10."

A standing Schroedinger wave does NOTHING of the sort; and therefore it cannot have kinetic energy, and neither can its "dual" electron.

So call it "Johan energy" if you like. An electron-standing-wave in sodium has "Johan energy". If the boundary conditions change because a gold contact has appeared, the wave equation predicts (WITHOUT needing an electric field) that the electron will propagate into the gold.

Again more of your BS. A laser beam does ....

Go ahead, write down the wave equation that describes counterpropagating laser beams. Let's see your math.

Thus acording to you a standing light wave cannot have less energy tha 2*h*(nu). You have really lost it have you not?

Nope, I can go through this whole system (either the cavity, or the counterpropagating-beams) and write down a version with a total occupation number of 1.

 

[ben m]

I have not yet been allowed to complete it and you already judge it? No wonder that you will never be a real scientist but only a cowering anonymous troll.

Johan, why are you posting axioms of your proof and asking "YES OR NO?" if you don't want people to judge them?

How do you expect someone to believe your "complete proof" when the axioms are misunderstood? The whole point of a proof is that ALL of the steps need to be right.

It's like:

"(a) 1+2 = 3. (b) 2+3 = 6. (c) ... hey, I have not been allowed to complete my proof and already you judge it? I will ignore you. (c) 6 - 3 = 2, and 6 - (1+2) = 2, therefore 1=0."

 

[ben m]

Statement 1:

Statement 1: (Defines Schottky diode)
Statement 2: (Defines Schottky diode again.)
Statement 3: (Tries to define reverse-biased diode, but get electric fields all wrong.)
Statement 4: (That's four statements in one)
Statement 5: (OK, this no longer has any sort of "proof" structure, does it? This is just a paragraph from some sort of longer explanation.)

 

[sol invictus]

Thank's Sol.

So Johan is correct when he states

"Electric potential is NOT a force: Only its gradient is a force per unit charge; which is the electric field."

Yes, that is correct (although I would delete the word "only" for clarity).

 

[Farsight]

No, you're wrong. In quantum mechanics, kinetic energy is not "rate of change of time of the position of the center of mass". Kinetic energy is proportional to the 2nd derivative of the wavefunction, and the 2nd derivative of the wavefunction is not zero.

But in relativity that kinetic energy is the mass-energy. Johan was referring to special relativity repeatedly.

Let me give you an example where the physics is as obvious as possible. Take one laser beam and shoot a pulse to the left. Take another laser and shoot a pulse to the right. Let the pulses fly through space, at some point, cross and overlap. The region of space where both, counterpropagating pulses are present has---uh-oh---a photon wavefunction with exactly the same properties as an ensemble of photons in a cavity.

It isn't a good example. There's no rest mass involved.

In other words, it looks in every detail like a standing wave; it has zero NET momentum; the center-of-momentum isn't moving anywhere; etc. (In fact, if you were standing in this region you would be unable to tell whether the light you're seeing is passing-in-the-night or trapped-in-a-cavity. Go ahead, do the math.) But you must agree that this region of space contains photons with ordinary kinetic energy---50% of it, on average, heading left and 50% heading right.

Yes I do. But it's like saying that two cannonballs going past in opposite directions at 400m/s have the same zero momentum as two cannonballs sitting on your desk. And then saying that one cannonball sitting on your desk has kinetic energy instead of mass-energy.

The laws of quantum mechanics---i.e., KE = (p-hat)^2/2m---will look at this wavefunction and get that fact right. (It'll say p = {left or right}, <p> = 0, <p^2> != 0, KE != 0, etc.) Your heuristic----"this is the wavefunction of a standing wave, so let's ignore Schrodinger and think about relativity"---will not.

There's a "whirlpool" subtlety here. I'll come onto that in a minute.

Johan has been denying that massive particles, in bound states, have kinetic energy. I diverted him onto photons only briefly.

I went back and read page 60 and didn't see anything that I thought was untoward from Johan. The gist of what he's saying is that the kinetic energy is now mass-energy. So go with the flow and say that a massless particle where the kinetic energy is rotational exhibits mass. But you can't then have your cake and eat it. Once you call it a massive particle you can't say it's got kinetic energy any more.

No, Farsight, I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The gist of the conversation was "what are the properties of a particle in a box"---properties like whether <p^2/2m> was or was not zero, whether <p^2/2m> reflects something about energy, whether that energy can be called kinetic, and (most importantly) whether or not could escape from the box without an acceleration.

I haven't got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The electron equates to the particle-in-the-box, but not just the particle, it's the whole system. And the box has mass, not kinetic energy. You only see that when you look through the window. Let me tell you about the whirlpool subtelty. You'll have heard me talking about the electron as a "photon in a box of its own making". A photon has momentum / kinetic energy, and energy-momentum doesn't disappear when we put the photon through pair production. Conservation of energy applies. Lose the positron, and focus on the electron. Let's say it's just sitting there not moving. Because it isn't moving, we say it has no kinetic energy. If we probe deeper and ask why this electron has magnetic moment and why the Einstein-de Haas effect exists, if we open the box, we can reason that there is kinetic energy and momentum in there. But it's rather like a whirlpool. Is a whirlpool rotating? No. The water is rotating. The whirlpool is a structure that's only there because the water is rotating. IMHO it's the same for an electron. The electron isn't rotating, and the standing wave that it is, isn't rotating either. Hence the electron has mass-energy rather than kinetic energy. There's an underlying dynamical nature to this, kinetic energy is in there, but once you've said it's a massive particle you've accounted for your kinetic energy.

Johan's discussion of all of this contradicts standard quantum mechanics, in very simple ways that contradict Niels-Bohr-era experimental facts, like "which measurements give predictable answers and which have random scatter?" and "does small delta-x mean large delta-p?" This has nothing to do with interpretation, which asks detailed questions about whether the wavefunctions-that-give-the-right-answers are hiding some underlying physics. Johan is disagreeing with the fact that the wavefunctions give the right answers at all.

I didn't read it that way.

(Then: you, and you alone, are volunteering to turn this into a relativity problem where the disagreement is about how mass/energy are labeled in different frames. Nothing to do with Copenhagen, and nothing to do with my statements that Johan makes quantum mistakes.)

Johan was referring to relativity repeatedly when I came in. And I recognised instantly that he was right about mass. A radiating body loses mass. How do you think the electron gets its mass by the way?

Likewise, I have plenty of colleagues who use Newton's Laws on a daily basis, and who don't have to think about relativity at all. This fact has nothing to say about whether Special Relativity is or is not correct; to see that, you have to specifically look for experiments that distinguish between the cases. Yes, there are plenty of experiments where "the full apparatus of modern quantum mechanics" and "the student version of quantum mechanics where you pretend photons are classical waves" will give the same answer, just like Newton and Einstein will give the same answers in many experiments.

Noted.

If your acquaintances have done an experiment that disagrees with Schrodinger's equation, they're welcome to publish it. They have not done so, unless you're referring to Johan. I repeat: there is no experimental evidence of any violation of standard quantum mechanics. That's how it got to be standard quantum mechanics.

Schrodinger's equation started life as something that described real waves. See wiki and the line that says The paper was enthusiastically endorsed by Einstein, who saw the matter-waves as an intuitive depiction of nature, as opposed to Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, which he considered overly formal. I'm with Einstein. And of course' Schrodinger's cat was intended to show how ridiculous the Copenhagen Interpretation was. Now it's used to promote quantum weirdness.

Well, I'm sitting here as an experimentalist in a department chock-full of theorists, and I will say bluntly that you have no idea what you're talking about. Other than generic-griping-about-string-theory (which is unidirectional), I have a hard time coming up with an anecdote, much less a pattern, of a recent "who ordered that" rivalry or an "erudite vs. greaseheads" dichotomy. Especially not in solid-state and atomic physics, for crying out loud, where you have experimentalists who get excited about critical exponents, and theorists who get excited about graphene CVD.

There's been too few who-ordered-that's recently. And not enough progress in physics. And I'm sorry ben, but I'm thinking the hostility and hubris I'm seeing directed at Johan here is part of the problem.

ETA...

Vorpal: your post 2505 noted. I don't think there's much I can say about it without going over the same ground again. We'll have to agree to differ.

 

[ben m]

I DO NOT KNOW OF SUCH A MEASUREMENT THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE:

A real scientist would have looked for such a measurement in the course of carefully researching whether or not your new-theory-of-quantum-mechanics is or is not consistent with the evidence.

Anyway, yes, such measurements are totally routine.

I AM NOT SAYING THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, BUT ARE YOU REALLY SO STUPID TO BELIEVE THAT IF SUCH A MEASUREMENT CAN BE MADE THIS MEASUREMENT WILL NOT AFFECT THE EQUILIBRIUM ARRANGEMENT OF CHARGES WITHIN THE METAL FROM WHAT IT IS WHEN YOU DO NOT MAKE SUCH A MEASUREMENT?

No, the experimental techniques I know of involve incredibly tiny perturbations. For example, when using a Kelvin probe, the probe current---very little of which needs to flow through the junction---is in the femtoamp to attoamp range. In a vacuum-electronics sort of setup we routinely do this with, say, 10 zeptoamps, i.e. one electron every few seconds.

What would a scientist do in this situation, Johan? You could keep assuming you're right, and yell at me hoping I'll spontaneously agree with you. Or you could go off and do some research. I repeat, Johan: I've been dealing with these patch effects, both the theory and multiple experimental methods, for years. You have just heard of them. Go learn something and catch up.

AND I WANT TO POINT OUT AGAIN THAT MY STATEMENTS TO EXPLAIN AND PROVE WHY I HAVE SUPERCONDUCTION AT ROOM TEMPERATURE DO NOT REQUIRE A DISCUSSION OF A CONTACT BETWEEN TWO METALS AND THE VOLTA EFFECT. YOU BEN AND ZIGGURAT ARE AGAIN BEING DECEITFUL IN CHANGING THE SUBJECT INTO ARGUMENTS WHICH ARE IRRELEVANT TO THE ISSUE.

We're still discussing your statements, Johan. You said explicitly in your statements that you were look at band structures and Fermi levels and inferring that there were, or were not, electric fields in certain places. You're wrong---your logic is wrong, your understanding of the physics and energetics are wrong, and your theory predicts pattern of charge-motion that contradict experiments. Part of the evidence that you're wrong is the Volta effect. Your hypothesis explicitly predicts that the Volta potential is zero. Experiments show that the Volta potential is not zero. Therefore your hypothesis is wrong.

You don't get to say "that's not relevant". "Hey, stop trying to test my hypothesis". You don't get to say "Only I get to decide where to test my hypothesis".

What you are really saying is "I have decided that my hypothesis is right, and I don't want to hear people trying to 'test' it as though 'tests' could prove it 'wrong'. Nothing can prove me wrong, not even science."

 

[Ziggurat]

But in relativity that kinetic energy is the mass-energy. Johan was referring to special relativity repeatedly.

And he has done so while also telling us to use the Schrodinger equation. But the Schrodinger equation is explicitly nonrelativistic, so there's no need and no point in talking about mass-energy when using the Schrodinger equation, which is what johan told us to use.

I went back and read page 60 and didn't see anything that I thought was untoward from Johan. The gist of what he's saying is that the kinetic energy is now mass-energy.

No, Farsight. He's saying that this energy (which standard quantum mechanics calls kinetic energy) doesn't even exist. He doesn't simply want to relabel it mass energy (I gave him plenty of opportunities to provide us with the label of his choice), he denies it even exists. And he has to do this in order to support his wrong claim that Fermi energies for different materials can only be different if their voltages are different. I note that you have been silent on this issue. I've got no real problem with anyone calling <p²>/2m "mass energy" (though it's non-standard terminology), but one must include it, and if one includes it, then johan's claims become rather obviously wrong.

I haven't got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The electron equates to the particle-in-the-box, but not just the particle, it's the whole system.

No, Farsight. We were talking about Fermi energies. And the Fermi energy is NOT an energy which describes the whole system. It is very much the energy of single electrons in a rather specific state, a state which has energy that standard quantum mechanics calls kinetic energy, but which regardless of the label is NOT due to electric potential.

Schrodinger's equation started life as something that described real waves. See wiki and the line that says The paper was enthusiastically endorsed by Einstein, who saw the matter-waves as an intuitive depiction of nature, as opposed to Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, which he considered overly formal. I'm with Einstein.

Heisenberg's matrix mechanics are exactly equivalent to Schrodinger's wave equation. You can prefer one over the other for whatever reason you choose (aesthetics, ease of use for a particular problem, easier for you to understand, whatever), but it doesn't matter. They will always give the same answer, precisely because they are equivalent. It's just different notation for the same thing.

There's been too few who-ordered-that's recently. And not enough progress in physics. And I'm sorry ben, but I'm thinking the hostility and hubris I'm seeing directed at Johan here is part of the problem.

johan has shown far more hubris in this thread than anyone else, and the hostility expressed towards johan is the direct result of his own dishonesty and rudeness. So don't come in here and lecture us about being nice, not when you're unaware of how exactly we actually got to this point. I already warned you about this before.

And your sole complaint about "not enough progress" seems to be the lack of room temperature superconductivity. But why should that be taken as an indicator of insufficient progress? You can't be sure that it's even possible, and even if it is, you've got no way of knowing how hard it will be. It reminds me of an opinion poll I heard about from the first half of the 1900's, where people were asked about what they thought would happen in the future. Most people thought we would cure cancer by the end of the century, but most people didn't think we'd land on the moon by then. They had it backwards. How do you know your expectations are any more reliable?

 

[johanfprins]

Statement 1: (Defines Schottky diode)
Statement 2: (Defines Schottky diode again.)

by adding an detail.

Statement 3: (Tries to define reverse-biased diode, but get electric fields all wrong.)

I do not get the electric fields all wrong: As long as there are enough donors to allow electrons to cross into the metal so that the Fermi-levels on both sides of the dipole layer are at the same energy for an applied voltage, there is no net electric field within the dipole. Only once the applied electric field gets so large that the Fermi-levels cannot be at the same energy anymore (to cancel the applied electric field within the dipole), does an electric field manifest within the dipole; which then eventually causes breakdown so that a reverse current flows through the dipole-layer.

Statement 4: (That's four statements in one)

I am quite willing to number them as four separate statements, but since they all deal with reverse breakdown in a Schottky barrier, I thought it prudent to group them together.

Statement 5: (OK, this no longer has any sort of "proof" structure, does it? This is just a paragraph from some sort of longer explanation.)

This is stating an very important experimental fact that has been proved many times by many different researchers. It plays a decisive role in the generation of superconduction at room temperature.

It is late in South Africa: I will be back tomorrow.

 

[Farsight]

The citation-5 you get to above is not a physics article of any importance; it's a crackpot article in a crackpot journal published by a random French society of amateur physicists. Matter is not light, and the theory of ref. 5 saying that it could be is a load of baloney.

It isn't crackpot. They're hands-on experimental guys, Williamson did his PhD at CERN. It took them six years to get it published, and that little journal is what they had to settle for. And it's been studiously ignored by people who don't want to talk about it, and who dismiss it as "crackpot" because it poses some kind of threat. Here's a link where you can access it. Here's another low-impact paper on the same general theme: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512265.

Makes me wonder how the great Gerardus 't Hooft could have cited such a thing. WAIT A MINUTE, did he? No he didn't. The author of "light is heavy" is not the famous high-energy theorist "Gerardus 't Hooft", whose middle initial is not W, but some other G. W. 't Hooft (with a very slim publication record, on lasers and thin films) at Philips. The article itself is unpublished, appears only on this one crackpot web page, and has never been cited in the mainstream literature.

But Vorpal said And reading it, there indeed isn't any deviation from standard textbook-standard physics. So dismissing it because it's been dismissed is not the sort of action I'd expect from a rational scientist who wants to understand his subject.

Many of the Google hits to this article appear to be John Duffield, AKA Farsight, posting it in discussion forums. Maybe that's why you keep thinking that this thread is about a kinetic-energy/mass equivalence? Because that's a topic you have a long interest in and want to bring up? It belongs in a different thread.

That's what I recognised instantly when I looked at this thread. Johan is right about mass, you guys are not, but you won't stop banging on about kinetic energy and getting confused about the photon in the box and the electron in a box. You're not really interested in kinetic energy, it isn't much to do with superconduction, you're just throwing anything in to cause disruption. So what if he said voltage is energy? I know what he meant, and he said there is a potential-energy difference e*V across the interface on page 60. Look at what you're doing. You're trying to shout him down. It shouldn't be like that. Let the man talk. Give him an honest hearing.

 

[Ziggurat]

I know that this is the Copenhagen interpretation of the Schroedinger's wave function

No, johan, that doesn't come from the Copenhagen interpretation.

If an electron has kinetic energy it must move relative to an inertial reference frame, and if it has a wave "associated" with it by "wave-particle duality" then even this wave must also move with the electron-particle. A standing Schroedinger wave does NOTHING of the sort; and therefore it cannot have kinetic energy, and neither can its "dual" electron.

Look, I really don't care if you refuse to call this kinetic energy or not. The name really doesn't matter. The point is that in quantum mechanics, I can calculate the energy of a state by calculating the quantity <H> = <p²>/2m + <V>. Do you deny this? Do you have some other way to calculate the energy of a wave function? Because that's the standard method. That is how we calculate, for example, that the binding energy of an electron in hydrogen is 13.7 eV. I can get that number by calculating <p²>/2m + <V>. If I don't include the <p²>/2m term, I can't get 13.7 eV. Do you have another way to get that number?

 

[Farsight]

...I note that you have been silent on this issue...

I've had trouble keeping up Zig. I've had my work cut just talking about the mass/kinetic energy thing that caught my attention. And I've got to go now, so I'm going to fall further behind. I'll look at the rest of your post later along with others.

 

[AvalonXQ]

Look, I really don't care if you refuse to call this kinetic energy or not. The name really doesn't matter. The point is that in quantum mechanics, I can calculate the energy of a state by calculating the quantity <H> = <p²>/2m + <V>. Do you deny this? Do you have some other way to calculate the energy of a wave function? Because that's the standard method. That is how we calculate, for example, that the binding energy of an electron in hydrogen is 13.7 eV. I can get that number by calculating <p²>/2m + <V>. If I don't include the <p²>/2m term, I can't get 13.7 eV. Do you have another way to get that number?

Dr. Prins, I would also request that you please address the questions in this post directly, as I believe it could clear up a fair amount of the confusion.

 

[ben m]

It isn't crackpot.

The van der Mark and 't Hooft article is an inoffensive pedagogical article about why internal-kinetic-energy is, from the outside, a component of rest mass. It's standard physics. My "crackpot" comment applies to citation 5 only. If you want to discuss either of these articles, start a thread about them.

 

[ben m]

As long as there are enough donors to allow electrons to cross into the metal so that the Fermi-levels on both sides of the dipole layer are at the same energy for an applied voltage, there is no net electric field within the dipole.

See? That's wrong. The Fermi level is the sum of an electrostatic potential and a quantum excitation energy. When two Fermi levels are equal, it means that the sum of these two is equal. At a junction of different materials, the quantum energy levels are different. The only way for the Fermi level to be the same is if the electrostatic energies are different, which means there IS an electric field.

We've been talking about this for ten pages, did you notice?

It's very simple. The fermi level F is the sum of an electrostatic contribution U and a quantum contribution Q. F=U+Q.

In two different materials, Q' != Q.

When the materials are in contact, F' = F.

Therefore, for different materials in contact, Q' + U' = Q + U.

Therefore U' - U = -(Q' - Q), which is not zero.

Therefore U' != U.

What part do you disagree with?

 

[Vorpal]

But Vorpal said And reading it, there indeed isn't any deviation from standard textbook-standard physics.

And other than possible nitpicking here and there, I still stand by that~none of those minor issues seem to have any relevance to this thread and so aren't worth fussing over here. The point you seem to be taking away from the article is there only as tacked-on speculation stated hypothetically, not actually supported in the article, and at best tangentially related to its focus.

 

[Reality Check]

Voltage is the potential energy of a Coulomb of charge: How the hell can it not be energy?

Because units of measurement of voltage are not that of energy, e.g. joules.
This is like arguing that a velocity is a length because it is a length per time.

Voltage is the potential energy of a Coulomb of charge: Thus it is not an energy. It is an energy per charge, e.g. joules per coulomb.