Super Material

[Ermelindo Klatt]

Thousandsof years ago, humans discovered they could heat rocks to get metal, and it defined an epoch. Then we refined iron into steel, and it changed the course of civilization. In the last century, we turned petroleum into plastic, and we changed the world again. Whenever we create materials that redefine the capabilities of the objects we can make, we send the world down an entirely new path.

For millennia, humanity built things with bone, wood, metal, and other materials both expensive to obtain and difficult to work with. The invention of plastic freed much of humanity from the limitations of material shortages and made a new world of life-enhancing products affordable to the masses.

Science fiction is rife with "super materials". Most often the materials are made from elements unknown to Current Era (CE) science. They use names that make us think of elements without being real elements.

In nuclear physics, the island of stability is the prediction that a set of heavy isotopes with a near magic number of protons and neutrons will temporarily reverse the trend of decreasing stability in elements heavier than Uranium. Although predictions of the exact location differ somewhat, Klaus Blaum expects the island of stability to occur in the region near the isotope 300Ubn.[1] Estimates about the amount of stability on the island are usually around a half-life of minutes or days, with "some optimists" expecting half-lives of millions of years.[2]

Although the theory has existed since the 1960s, the existence of such superheavy, relatively stable isotopes has not been demonstrated. Like the rest of the superheavy elements, the isotopes on the island of stability have never been found in nature, and so must be created in an artificial nuclear reaction to be studied. However, scientists have not found a way to carry out such a reaction.

A great cutting-edge research topic for near-future SF is the use of magnetic flux pinning and superconductors to make large-scale structure. A space station can be held together by flux that's stronger than physical material and yet can be stressed and replaced without permanent damage. Two modules can be held in relative position by invisible lines of force, as strong as the power you can feed to augment it, using electromagnetism to offset or restore from any outside force. Normally it's passive in that a force to one object that causes it to move relative to the other will induce electric currents in the superconductor which generate forces to compensate and reverse the motion. So the force trying to tear it apart is being used against itself to resist the separation, as long as the superconductor can buffer it. In reality you need to add some power to overcome losses and make it "go back" rather than being able to perfectly resist a force with infinitesimal movement produced.

The result from a large view is an unbreakable beam of apparent unlimited strength. For a network mesh of elements, it can be elastic (allow them to move and store energy in the superconductors or as magnetic fields) or rigid or change from one to the other, or reconfigure on command by changing the presented magnetic flux tubes and capture points.

Now scale that down: instead of nodes being multi-ton spacecraft modules, what if they were built using nanotechnology, with one node being the size of a mineral grain? What appears to be a common brick or stone would be held together not with residual covalent forces between the mineral grains, but with magnetic flux pinning and the ability to put the grains all back where they belong with no permanent damage after a huge stress passes through.

Stop and think about that; this is many times the energy release of nuclear fusion reactions. A strangelet would be releasing photons at fantastic energies just by feeding it with a slow stream of neutrons. A ship powered by a strangelet engine would be a fantastic weapon simply by slewing the vessel around to point the drive beam at whatever seem threatening.

There are very many natural and artificial materials which today are available only in tiny quantities. In the future, in bulk? Examples include spider silk (and spinarets to fabricate with it) and buckminsterfullerenes with precisely controlled chemical substitutions so they can be built into molecules and polymers. Oh and unwettable dirt-shedding fabrics nanostructured like lotus leaves.

One thing we have no leads on. Theory suggests room temperature superconductors are possible. If one were discovered it would have huge impact. Superconductivity remains very poorly understood compared to most other properties of matter.

It's not really a supermaterial but if someone could work out how to produce muons in an energy-efficient manner we'd have our energy needs satisfied via muon-catalysed fusion: a trivially simple process if you have the muons.

More possibly a really high energy density battery or capacitor that lasts well and is not prone to exploding when provoked. I'm optimistic i'll see electrical energy storage cracked in my lifetime and a fully solar powered future arriving.

atomic-scale structures or layers that allow novel or optimal combinations of properties, while not being overly mysterious in fundamental limits of what individual properties (like strength) can allow.

Look at what's been discovered about graphene, and now-mundane semiconductors in general. Electrical characteristics might not be interesting for "material", but imagine the same kind of control being applied to the atomic bonds that are responsible for bulk mechanical properties.

Different materials are best for different purposes so it might not be best to create only one material to use for many purposes. For each purpose, there's a trade-off between different advantageous properties.

Given a set of properties that we want a material to have all of, there exists a an amount of each property that a material can exist with each of for which there can exist a material with even more of one of those properties but not without having less of one of the other properties.

I can think of such a good material but don't know if it's stable enough to be able to be produced. Grow a perfect crystal of Carbon(IV) nitride around a seed crystal by slowly freezing it out of its molten state in an environment with a precisely controlled temperature to get rid of all impurities.

I think its maximum homogeneous nucleation rate is low enough that it can undergo the glass transition because not very much volume energy would be released in the nucleation of the crystalline state because when nitrogen makes 3 bonds, its bonds can flex back and forth with ease.

Next, etch it nanosmooth with a liquid that has a contact angle greater than 90 with it. Because it has a contact angle greater than 90, it will not stack to the object or even leave one drop on it after the last bit of the object gets pulled out so it will not evaporate from the substance redepositing what it etched away as a rough surface.

I think that as a result of the slight excess of nitrogen atoms, it will be a covalent network with random walking half antibonds and if the etching acid is dilute enough, atoms will be dissolving much faster than they're precipitating onto the surface because it's a dissolution by chemical reaction so half antibonds will random walk to the surface faster than the surface atoms get etched away giving the surface atoms a full outer shell making the material non-stick enough that the acid will not wet it and therefore leave it nanosmooth after the material gets pulled out of the acid. The material will probably have such a high theoretical strength that it's better than any infinitely ductile material that could be produced.

It will have a very high strength to start with because it was etched nanosmooth, and it will be so hard that almost nothing can scratch it very much so its strength won't reduce very much with use. A dish made of it would really truly be unbreakable as a result of its high strength. According to my answer at Why is glass so breakable?, for any material, the speed two spheres of that material that are the same size must collide with each other in order to form a crack is the sheer modulus to the power of -2 times the strength to the power of 5/2 times density to the power of -1/2 times some constant, but that substance would have a strength that's a significant fraction of its sheer modulus.

Its strength will lower even less with use because it's amorphous. Also because it's so smooth, any contact edge between water, air, and that substance will be vibrating due to the dynamic equilibruim of the water's evaporation and condensation making the advancing and receding contact angle of water with it be so close together that drops of water on plates made of that substance will roll off with ease in the dishwasher.

Even drops of a liquid that has a contact angle less than 90 but doesn't completely wet it will roll off with ease until they're at locally lowest point on the surface on the underside. Because it's amorphous, it will warp with very high temperatures so another material might be best for temperatures of 2000C.

It's perfect crystal corundum with a small fraction of its aluminum atoms replaced with silicon atoms etched nanosmooth. Corundum actually is a covalent network according to an alternate definition despite the electronegativity difference of more than 1.7 because each bond has 2 electrons localized to that bond.

Since it's a covalent network, replacing a small fraction of the aluminum atoms with silicon atoms would create random walking half antibonds some of which would random walk to the surface making it non-stick.

I think a perfect crystal of that substance can be slowly grown from a molten mixture of aluminum, silicon, and oxygen where the amount of silicon in the mixture is very small and the number of oxygen atoms is slightly less than 1.5 times the number of aluminum atoms plus the number of silicon atoms. Actually 2 crystals would be nucleated, one of that substance and one of pure silicon. That substance could actually be etched into a crucible for molten carbon(IV) nitride because it would be so non-stick.

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