Amidst all the doom and gloom surrounding the company, sterling work is still being done in IBM Corp’s laboratories, and the company now report that scientists at the Thomas J Watson Research Center have now significantly improved the current-carrying ability of single crystals of the high-temperature superconducting ceramic compound of Yttrium-Barium-Copper Oxide and the demonstration resulted from work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois and Ames Laboratory and the Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa as well as at IBM; the technique consists of the deliberate, controlled introduction of defects into crystals of the superconducting ceramic by bombarding them with a beam of very energetic, electrically charged atoms of the element Tin; the Tin ions produce damage in the crystals in the form of very thin columns (20 atoms wide) that are no longer superconducting; the defects are aligned with the direction of the bombarding ions and extend most of the way through the smallest dimension of the crystals, platelets that typically measure 1 mm by 1mm by 0.02mm; the defects cause an increase in the maximum current a superconductor can sustain, particularly in external magnetic fields by preventing the motion of magnetic field lines that would otherwise produce electrical resistance and the loss of utility of the superconducting material.
