Ask A Scientist© Physics Archive

name         Larry
status       educator
age          40s
Question -   What is the listing of electrical conductive elements
with the best conductor listed first?

I am currently in a program and there is no discussion of platinum or gold
as conductors and what their ranking would be.

You can look up electrical (and thermal) conductivity data in handbooks on
material properties at your reference library.  Introductory books on
electrical engineering also carry this information but perhaps not as
extensively as a handbook.  Silver, gold, and platinum are highly conductive
but expensive, that is why copper is often used.  Also note that electrical
conductivity is temperature dependent; this dependency is responsible for
certain materials exhibiting superconductivity (extremely high conductivity)
at low temperatures.

Ali Khounsary, Ph.D.
Advanced Photon Source
Argonne National Laboratory
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The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, published by the Chemical Rubber
Company, which can be found on the reference shelf of most libraries, give a
list of resistivities of the elements. Copper, silver and gold have the
lowest resistively, but remember that purity as well as crystal defects from
how the metal was worked mechanically and annealed thermally can change the
resistively greatly.

Vince Calder
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