Recent W&M Condensed Matter Physics Grad. Worked closely with HT Kim, not on this project. He is a trustworthy guy, knows his stuff. I think he is right when he calls the paper very sloppy, I am confused why there is no phase diagram and the sample purity seems suspect. These are things I think would have been addressed in peer review and would give me more confidence overall. Probably not fraud, but doesn't mean it's superconductivity.
Not optimistic about replication in the next week too, Solid State Synthesis seems "easy" but in my experience can be problematic. Not an expert in that part though
Glad to see a realistic take on HN. Endlessly frustrating to see people be like "this will be replicated in days". Yeah, sure, let every other lab just drop what they're doing, order all the reagents on express, do a thorough characterization making sure they understand the impurities and crystal phase, then perform good airtight measurements in a couple days. Crystal growth always has complications many times outside of your control - the most minor of things can cause ridiculous problems.
Especially when they admit to having phase impurities, and it's not really clear how they've gone from bulk sample to measurement sample (are they really measuring just the superconductor or the impurity phase?). Needs addressing, especially when the Cu2S phase impurity seems to have a phase transition of it's own at or around 370K (suspiciously close to where some of their Tc measurements are).
Replication attempts don't give you an unambiguous signal, many things can go wrong.
If one lab hasn't succeeded in replicating the paper, does that mean the paper is wrong, or just that a necessary step wasn't documented clearly or followed correctly?
More labs trying to replicate give you more independent signals.
Although the experimental protocol had not been published, physicists in several countries attempted, and failed, to replicate the excess heat phenomenon. The first paper submitted to Nature reproducing excess heat, although it passed peer review, was rejected because most similar experiments were negative and there were no theories that could explain a positive result;[notes 2][42] this paper was later accepted for publication by the journal Fusion Technology. Nathan Lewis, professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, led one of the most ambitious validation efforts, trying many variations on the experiment without success,[43] while CERN physicist Douglas R. O. Morrison said that "essentially all" attempts in Western Europe had failed.
My memory is fuzzy, but my recollection is that Pons & Fleischmann's non-discovery involved unclear "waste heat" measurements, and a setup that wasn't well described, making it difficult for other researchers to duplicate. That would seem to contrast with Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon's work, where everything suggests they've provided a readily replicable description of the material and process, and the evidence (magnetic levitation) is going to be pretty obvious.
I mean being thorough will obviously take a long time, but if a decent number of research groups decide to drop what they're doing and attempt a replication I don't think it would take that long for one of them to at least partially succeed if the claim is true. That doesn't mean they're publishing a sister paper, but it might mean we see some tweets saying "my group synthesized LK-99 and we have reason to believe it may be a rtp superconductor"
I would only expect these kinds of posts from a throwaway account created very recently with a single post.
Anyone with a long HN history is more likely trying to karma farm and chase clout by spinning up some bullshit. Trying to establish themselves as an authority on a trending topic.
But because a throwaway account has no past or future, it is the purest form of communication.
It is entirely believable that a person with substantial trace on HN and ties in the field would rather create a throwaway than post such remark under his main account.
Then they would not out their identity by claiming to have worked with the author. That piece of information alone whittles their identity down to maybe 100 people. Out of 100 adjacent academics how many post on HN, with this style, and this specific level of knowledge in that specific subfield? They may as well have just made the account their irl name. Anonymity is not a realistic goal. Assuming a realistic poster means it's reasonable to suspect their earnestness.
You are frustrated and this makes you act in a deliberately obtuse manner.
There is a world of difference between "anyone who has worked with the guy" and "has worked with the guy + has hundreds of comments on HN identifying career track over the last few years". The former grants each suspect plausible deniability, while the latter pinpoints the true author.
> Anonymity is not a realistic goal.
It obviously is for a throwaway account. Time to reread the classic
i agree re. skepticism but all I'm saying about HT Kim is that he's a real scientist with real bona fides, which I think you could find by asking anyone in my specific subfield of condensed matter physics
i should also have mentioned that I do not personally know the extent of his knowledge about superconductivity, to my understanding he was an expert on the synthesis of phase change materials, particularly the metal insulator transition. in the 2nd paper he is cited for proposing the superconductivity mechanism based on mechanisms seen in the metal-insulator-transition, which I have not seen before as an SC mechanism
To me the biggest mystery is why they didn't make multiple samples and send them to a few places that could verify their claims immediately. I understand that the papers were published before they really wanted to but they've also apparently have had samples for awhile it sounds like?
So assuming it's not BS (and I doubt that it is) it would lead me to believe that making the material is difficult to get right? The video they've produced uses a sample that isn't particularly elegant, to be sure.
I guess it's all conjecture at this point and healthy skepticism is warranted. A press conference would be nice.
Skepticism is warranted, but apparently there's infighting in the group (only 3 people can be recipients of a Nobel Prize) and one jumped the gun to get his name out there. And also apparently fear of research espionage from the PRC (not as far-fetched as it sounds).
Man, fucking scientists dude, they need to get their heads on straight
If you're one of the 7 people who invented room temperature superconductivity, it's not going to matter who has the Nobel Prize. You can take a part time 7 figure consulting gig and be as famous as you want to boot
Most famous discovers of famous phenomena do not get 7 figure consulting gigs. Did any discoverers of high Tc superconductors, quantum hall, topological insulators, blue LEDs, graphene get rich? Not as far as I know.
i do not understand this either regarding the samples, usually(in my limited experience) synthesis groups have collaborators that specialize in transport or other types of measurements which I think would have added a bit of credibility, probably could have gotten a measurement of Tc, and just generally added a lot to the paper
That could very well have been their plan, they just got beat to the punch by the paper leak. Shrug. Probably won’t get the full story til next summer when Netflix inevitably does a C tier docu-drama series about it.
In the New Scientist interview HT Kim seemed to imply that he wouldn't help other researchers until his paper gets published. If the synthesis ends up being tricky this could take a while.
“In 2020, I submitted my research results to Nature for the first time, but Nature felt burdened about publishing the paper because of Professor Dias’ case, and asked for it to be published in other professional journals first.”
That's extremely hilarious if real. He basically just told the guys at the Max Plank institute they're lazy theoreticians that don't understand chemistry and can't be bothered to put in the work like he has. (over 100 attempts at making this!)
This is a great kind of rivalry between theory folks and applied folks. When good natured it can be a lot of fun. It’s also important to have these two kinds of groups annoyed with each other poking holes in each others methods.
It's learning a craft, constant refinement, iteration, failure, and eventual success. And then luck, that which is out of your control, gets you over the line.
I am more likely to believe that the group to get room temperature superconductivity first (if anyone ever does) will have been learning the hard way about how to maximise that within their control so all that is left to succeed is that outside their control.
I am not saying that I am 100% sold on this being it. It's not 20 years of failure. It's 20 years of refinement.
I am going to attempt to address the common nitpicks in one fell swoop:
1. Rushed publication, plot quality, grammar, etc. Get over yourselves. This is a pre-print for an instant-Nobel, next-tier-of-civilization level discovery. The proper publication will come in due time. Waiting for a more complete verification is a sheltered view. Being first matters. Things changed after the J/Psi discovery in 1974. For those that don't know, Sam Ting discovered it first, yet sat on it for months waiting for a complete verification. Then Richter's group also discovered it months later and Ting was forced to publish at the same time and share the Nobel. This changed the publication attitude in the field significantly. Being first matters.
2. "Terrible science." Again, get over yourselves. Just because the preprint doesn't match your taste specifically doesn't mean it's bad science. You can't satisfy everyone- there will ALWAYS be someone who complains about some missing measurement or plot they view as essential. Most of the time, the 'missing' component is directly related to their own work. In other words, people want to see what they understandd as being important to them, also reflected in other publications. That does not mean it's a valid criticism. It's nitpicking.
The most realistic timeline is 2-3 months for a positive verification. 6 months for a negative verification. If it works, it will be quicker because a positive reproduction needs less work. A negative verification needs to be more thorough and will take more time.
> 2. "Terrible science." Again, get over yourselves. Just because the preprint doesn't match your taste specifically doesn't mean it's bad science. You can't satisfy everyone- there will ALWAYS be someone who complains about some missing measurement or plot they view as essential. Most of the time, the 'missing' component is directly related to their own work. In other words, people want to see what they understandd as being important to them, also reflected in other publications. That does not mean it's a valid criticism. It's nitpicking.
Not knowing the precise Tc for the material isn't nitpicking that is pretty basic ("above 400C" isn't a very precise measurement). Questioning if their graph showing the Meissner effect isn't really showing the Meissner effect isn't really some obscure criteria.
Bet we get results a whole lot quicker than that as well.
Their PPMS is limited to 400K. There's nothing they can do about that. So yes, it is a nitpicking. I've used the same instrument, that's the max temperature quantum design allows without forking over more money. It matters to get the results out there and be first.
I completely agree. I see many people commenting that the document has bad grammar or charts, completely ignoring that they probably authored it in Korean. Also looks like Kwan and HT Kim are fighting who gets to be 3rd Nobel winner so any problems with quality of the layout are easily explained by this.
One thing that is a green flag in my opinion is that apparently they had a sample for a long time (year+) so I find it unlikely they made an obvious measuring mistake.
But as always, most would love to have this be true and sometimes this gets better of us.
What do you think the chances are of it being a measurement/instruments error?
Edited to add: I am not a physicist. I don't know the subtleties of measuring experiments, and it was not my intention to state that there was a measurement error. I just wanted to ask someone for their assessment of the chances it was an error.
It's a little depressing that people are so quick to assume the worst of others, but I get why. The online flamewars fought over every announcement of this type would definitely put people on guard. Heck, on the UAP thread yesterday I immediately leapt to snarking about extraordinary announcements being bogus and I feel bad that I probably attacked it for no reason other than to feel cool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36886221
IANAS, but science Twitter seems to think 1) authors aren't clowns but 2) there's a non-zero chance they've misinterpreted non-SC effects because 3) there's missing or inconsistent data that would conclusively prove SC
Small. Imperfect contact, unplugged terminals, etc. These are not 1st year grad students who don't know what they are doing. The authors have decades of research and fabrication experience, and publications to back it up. Comments that insinuate it could be those kind of novice mistakes (other comments on HN/reddit, not yours) are frankly insulting and speaks to a profound arrogance in being unable to accept a new discovery.
Compared to recent controversial results claiming the exact same thing (actually, more restrictive than this claim), it's not insulting it is what you should expect. The recent situation with Dias this year[1] is now under investigation as a case of data fabrication and he didn't even claim to have ambient pressure.
Frankly there are too many details missing to trust them. They've fabricated a thin film but not characterized it. It is well known that the properties of a material change when you go from bulk to thin film with a big dependence on the thickness. They don't mention how the resistance of this thin film is measured - that's important for what artifacts you might expect to see in your measurements (van der Pauw vs Hall bar measurements are the standard but they don't mention using either). Without characterizing the thin film it's also difficult to know, chemically and structurally, what you are measuring. I don't see any data confirming the quality of the thin film. The way the data is presented is such that it can be misleading, showing I-V curves instead of resistance when you are really trying to say the resistance is what is changing. The first paper doesn't even mention the insulator-metal transition that is present in the second paper which is bizarre - this is important if you are also claiming a superconductor transition close by and you would expect some discussion of this behaviour.
All of these are things that, one would hope, will be picked up by the reviewers as low hanging fruit before even really delving into the detail of the theory they present.
Decades of experience alone should not be trusted. Anyone can make a mistake, and not all the authors can be present for every experiment.
I apologize if I came across as insinuating it was an error, I was just asking you for your assessment of the chances it could be an error.
I'm not well versed in the subtleties of physics experiment measurement, so I figured I'd ask. It's difficult for a layperson to determine which "side" is right when battle lines are drawn after these types of announcements.
I know, I did not think for a moment that you were making such an accusation. I was referring to the other comments on HN/reddit over the past week making those accusations. Sorry if my comment came off that way.
Agreed. Skepticism is not only necessary but welcomed. But some of the comments are painting these guys like they are clowns. A bit of digging shows they've been working on this in some part since 1999 and that they were able to secure funding a few years back. And since then they've brought on other highly credible people and have in fact have been able to build this material awhile now.
This isn't some grad students that just stumbled upon something they mistook for something else. There's a really good chance this is legit and that lots of physics will need to be looked at.
Pretty much agree on criticisms of sloppiness. First off this is a preprint. More importantly, rushing to put a stake in the ground is reasonable in this case. if they are right 'instant Nobel' is just the half of it. The authors are guaranteed a place in the scientific pantheon.
So, has anyone seen any of the replication studies start coming in yet? From what I've read we seem to be waiting on those. (and I think they're likely coming today or tomorrow?)
There are several rumors from zhihu.com posts that various Chinese labs are racing to replicate it (which is not unexpected). Some claims that "The Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully synthesized the sample".
Many labs around the world are capable of synthesizing the material (which is not that hard, relative to the baseline for superconductor candidates). We should expect to see early chatter and observation from replication attempts within double digit number of hours.
So the authors are disciples of a professor specialized in superconductor, their own Master and PhD were about superconductor, then they created a lab/company specifically for researching superconductor. This is contrary to my earlier belief that they were just normal chemists/physicists that happened to stumble upon an interesting material.
Unless they're lying through their teeth, it's hard to believe they would not recognize an actual SC when they see one.
Lee was stuck as an adjunct professor for 19 years. Kim thinks that physicists all have their head up their ass and he knows the shortcut to discovering superconductivity. And nature wouldn't publish their paper.
Combined with their inability to accurately measure Tc and a lot of skepticism already out there that their graphs show what they say they do this looks like poor science.
Which is not to accuse them of lying. It looks like they're just not very good, but think they're geniuses.
That graphic isn't saying there's a shortcut, it's basically saying that physicists need to work harder and try many many many many more materials than they do. Not quite trial and error since the classes of materials should be informed by some theory, but far more - multiple thousands per individual.
He states it took 1000 attempts with two steps in the process requiring a "stroke of luck". This doesn't sound like it's going to be easy to replicate or verify.
The fourth step, chromatography, ensures that every height on the test film is a consistent compound, from then on you'd figure out which compound that it is, and reproduce it separately and retest it, which is what they claim to have done.
I love the colorful play-by-play. It could almost be a kdrama.
It's also kind of crazy that one of the authors did over 1000 experiments until he found LK-99, regardless of whether it checks out. Talk about a grind mindset.
Material science can be like that … you’re pretty sure your theory works and your results don’t wildly invalidate it, but they aren’t good enough or are missing a property or something… and it turns out you could very easily have made a bad batch, poorly aligned fibers, badly mixed epoxy, or any number of possible issues… so you try again and again to get it right… sometimes it’s for very little incremental progress in state of the art… other times it might be a Nobel prize winning superconductor.
In undergrad, I spent countless hours with a mortar and pestle, sintering, and annealing to research a particular superconductor, never getting much sleep because I had to wake up every couple hours to make sure nothing had gone awry... It tickles me that they were doing the same thing. Hoping that they get the big win here, for all of our sakes.
Yup. Also tickles me that I might have had better equipment than this team, though we still had to source sample carriers from McDonalds.
The multi-million-dollar measurement apparatus required us to put samples in disposable tubes that cost about a dollar each. They turned out to have the exact same physical properties as a McDonalds straw, so once a week someone made a food run and grabbed a handful on the way out.
He’s just some guy at an aerospace startup who is trying to make some lol.
Problem with his approach is that the synthesis requires some materials that are restricted to academic/scientific labs (like red phosphorus), so he’s probably not going to be first to replicate.
LOL they really renamed it X? I see they even bought x.com which surely they paid some ridiculous amount for, and yet they wasn’t able to spend any cent on original logo, at least X.org logo as an orange O.
Musk has owned the X.com domain since at least 2017. [1] And even that was buying it back from PayPal. X.com was an online bank co-founded by Musk in 1999 which was later on merged into PayPal. [2]
Elon has personally owned x.com for a number of years now. Timeline as I remember it is Elon bought it in the late 90's, it changed hands when paypal merged with Elon's payment company, then he bought it back in 2017ish
Still make me laugh. I doubt the 2017 transfer costed $10. Let’s just recall all the more that domains are never really own, and that seems all the more crazy to my mind. Though I guess that when you let single individuals able to claim indefinitely large amount of ownership, that’s unavoidable waste of resources.
I don’t criticize any individual for simply implementing what the social structure lead them to do. That is, my messages were not meant into "name and shame" any specific person. That’s really the overall social game that I found laughable.
Using a unicode character might have been deliberate. It lets anyone stick your logo on a post on another platform. Allows viral marketing even in places where posting an image is high friction and/or where hyperlinks are banned.
We'll have to wait and see if such a move is a good one...
Elon Musk re-bought the domain 6 years ago, after having originally owned it since 1999, apparently being very attached to it [0]. As for the logo, yeah, I agree there.
Today might be a bit soon. We only caught wind of this Tuesday and there's about two days of cooking to be done in the process. Friday if someone is basically livestreaming and literally had everything on hand. My guess is more likely Monday for the aggressive builders that get it right the first time (if it's able to be got right). Then Wednesday/next Thursday for attempt number 2 to complete out for some people.
I'm also highly scheptical but if you'd asked a bunch of random people wether or not the relativity theory is true or nuclear weapons when they were first demonstrated they probably would have been equally sceptical
What does that prove though? It's not wrong to doubt extraordinary hypotheses just because they are sometimes correct. Consider all the times those kinds of hypotheses are confirmed to be wrong.
So technically the question asked is only if "the first independent replication attempt" will confirm (current guess 10%) and I think thats about right I can imagine there is a lot of 'build Twitter in a weekend' going on and it will take a while before the dust settles and there is a solid replication to base a solid conclusion.
I was a high energy theorist and I even went to the same school as this guy (Princeton). I’ll admit I’m a complete rando when it comes to superconducting materials. PhD in an unrelated subfield means very little. I guess it helps with grokking academic drama.
For context, he is the same guy that went viral yesterday[0] excited with optimism, now saying there are other more possible explanations for the results besides superconductivity
The first sentence already raises a big red flag. "This paper examines the way of thinking and limitations of physicists regarding the phenomenon of superconductivity". Stop these ridiculous presumptuous claims about "limitations of physicists" before the work is actually verified and proven.
Koreans have a mean and antagonistic streak, that's why they're so good at making dramas, but still outrageous opener lol. I wonder if Korean academic culture is different from ours.
If this confirms, I really hope that the current limitation can be overcome. That would be brutal to actually find a ambient temperature and pressure SC only to have its usefulness for big real world applications be nerfed.
I think the most important thing is it proves it can be done.
At one point it was thought impossible to run a 4 minute mile. There were all kinds of scientific sounding explanations why it just couldn’t be done. Then someone did it. Shortly after that, lots of people did it, because now people knew it was possible.
If this is for real, it proves it can be done. Tons of money, work, and innovation will follow once people know the problem can be solved.
If it's confirmed, people will be investigating improving the process for manufacturing LK-99 almost immediately and have some success, as well as looking into similar materials with different doping etc. It's likely that there would be at least some that also exhibit RTP superconductivity, though it's also likely they would share many of LK-99's weaknesses. Though that's all getting ahead of ourselves...
The other comments are correct, but I'll add that (if there's actually SC going on) there's not even necessarily a current limitation. Only a current was reported in the paper, not a cross-sectional area, and the sample being used appears to have been a thin film, the thickness of which we have no idea.
History always repeats itself. Anytime a potential groundbreaking result is announced with one or some of the following characteristics, more likely than not something fishy or problematic ensues.
1. Paper submitted hastily without all authors in agreement or even knowing.
(Check, two separate papers were submitted with collaborators in the US missing in one paper)
2. Not all due diligence and checks were done, e.g. missing tests or providing half-assed "proofs".
(Check, missing phase transition results, provided video proof for superconductivity shows imperfect samples and diamagnetism, no full levitation, no pinning effect in superconductivity. You would imagine they could have made good samples instead of broken ones and completed all necessary tests since the material was obtained at least 3 years ago)
So in all, they seem to be rushing to conclusions and public fame than being cautious and scientific.
Why do we need evidence of repeatability? At this point just evidence that a rtp superconductor exists, even if we can't create anymore of it, would be a nobel.
Doesn't matter, we need a new thread because if there are too many comments things on HN become unusable. Or is there a way to sort by most recent comments that I am not aware of?
Actually, cold fusion exists! Even energy-positive at that. It's just not positive enough - current production method is too wasteful to be of practical use (creating muon is too expensive atm).
The lead author says (translated):
“In 2020, I submitted my research results to Nature for the first time, but Nature felt burdened about publishing the paper because of Professor Dias’ case, and asked for it to be published in other professional journals first.”
Conduct electricity with zero resistance. This has been possible at cryogenic temperatures (powers supermagnets, MRI etc) but running at room temperature _and pressure_ means in theory that you don’t need expensive support machinery. Has been the holy grail for the field.
If true, this specific case is only low current, but demonstrates such a thing is possible - almost certainly winning an instant Nobel Prize.
Computers would still get hot, because the main cause of heat is not resistance in wires, it's that when a transistor switches with charge in the gate, you need to dump that charge, and when you do this it turns to heat.
They would get less hot, because there are plenty of transmission losses too.
I was one of the people who said power is wasted in wires.
When the charged stored inside a chip needs to change (like go from high to low), that energy associated with the charge needs to go somewhere. Currently most of the charge is dissipated in the wire and some of it within the transistor.
If the wires have no resistance, the transistor will be the one dissipating the energy, not the energy simply disappears.
So technically both options are right, but my position is the “technically right, but practically wrong” position lol
That said if the interconnects are less resistive, the switching process becomes more efficient and less power will be wasted than the bare minimum required.
I wanted to add but my morning poop time was over so never had a chance to write this.
If you have two capacitors, say C1 and C2, and say their capacitance is both C.
Say C1 is charged up to 2V. The energy stored in that cap is 1/2 CV^2 = 2C.
Say C2 is not charged up.
The charge on C1 is Q = CV = 2C. The charge on C2 is 0.
Say suddenly you connect C1 to C2 via a lossless wire.
The charge on C1 and C2 must be equal before and after the connection since charge cannot be destroyed.
After the connection, the voltage on both caps will be equal, and the charge on them will therefore be equal.
Charge on each cap is 1C; voltage is therefore Q/C = V, V = 1V on both caps..
Now let's look at the energy on either cap. 1/2 CV^2 = 0.5C.
The combined energy on both caps are 1C. Where'd the energy go? We just said we connected the capacitors with a lossless wire, so it can't be dissipated there, and capacitors by definition cannot dissipate power.
The answer is that lossless wires cannot exist, and if you do the math more carefully, this time with real resistance and take the limit as R->0, you will see that the power-time integral of the wire (dissipated energy) will approach 1C.
The same argument can be made for integrated circuits; as your resistance drops, more and more of the portion of loss will be dissipated in the "other" sources of loss.
edit: superconductors are lossy at AC (but not as much as regular conductors get lossy at AC), and the capacitor connection is an AC phenomena so even with superconductors there will be a teeny loss even with superconducting wires. The rest of the loss will happen in other ways (EM radiation, dielectric loss, loss from capacitor resistance, etc)
One of the biggest use cases (for superconductors that meet their requirements) would be long distance power transmission, where as much as 30% of the power is lost over long distances.
Essentially, (and very top level) you could produce 30% more power, without adding any more production capactity.
It is my understanding that computers would still need to somehow dissipate energy when they perform irreversible computations, and that will turn into heat. E.g. when you compute the AND of two bits, then the result is only one bit and you have to dispose of the remaining bit either as heat or as a garbage output signal.
That's a thermodynamic limit, but we're not even close to hitting that yet.
RTP superconductors still aren't going to magically make computers emit zero heat, though; there are other sources besides resistive losses. I was under the impression that other factors dominated, though a couple people responded yesterday to tell me that resistance is the primary source of heat. Not an expert in that area, would love for someone who does chipset design to clarify.
Portable MRI would be a huge deal. We'd also see superconducting motors in electric vehicles, along with marked efficiency gains in every part of EV systems.
We could have a superconducting power grid with solar panels distributed across the planet. Superconducting batteries could give us grid level storage. It also reduces the cost of hypothetical fusion reactors, their magnets can be cooled with unpressurized water instead of liquid helium.
Calling this the most revolutionary discovery of the last hundred years isn't an overstatement. This will affect almost every industry and in ways that we can't even imagine yet. If this material is what they claim, it's going to be a new era for our species.
Those won't happen with the current magnetic field limitations. Ironically, this is the thing that makes me believe them more rather than less: it is plausible that if you find a material that is superconducting at room temperature that it isn't right away going to be ideal in every other respect, and it would have been very easy to fake that one too.
There are all sorts of neat things that you can do with superconductors now (toroidal inductor batteries, basically anything that would benefit from super strong coils like motors and magnets, novel electronics...) with the caveat that they are hilariously expensive to fabricate, and need a hilariously expensive cryogenic system built around them.
The cherry on top is that the materials and fabrication for this material seem relatively cheap.
People like to list technologies it would improve, like power transmission or MRIs, but I think it will be hard to predict what technologies are completely enabled by this, such as potentially fusion or quantum computing or things I don't even know about yet.
I asked a similar question and got the answer that we could technically put a ton of solar panels in the Sahara and use this new material to transmit that power to anywhere in the world (without losing any power). Currently you couldn't do that since transmission lines lose power over distance.
Can someone help me understand what it means for a superconductor (which should have zero resistance) to have such a low current capacity? Does this mean it's possible to have a voltage drop across the superconductor? Does that voltage drop somehow not result in power dissipation? Is it something like capacitive or inductive reactance?
Superconductors aren't always superconducting. There is a set of circumstances in which superconduction happens. If the current is below this limit, voltage is 0. If current is above this limit, then voltage is more accurately predicted from bulk resistivity numbers. This image is on it's side from a normal I-V curve, but accurately describes the relationship: https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Irds.jpg. At Ic the material stops superconducting.
Note that there are temperature and magnetic field effects on the value of Ic, which in every other currently-known material is 0 at 300 K.
In superconducting magnets, this sudden loss of superconductivity is called a quench[1] and can be destructive. The LHC recently suffered from this, discussed here[2], and is undergoing repairs.
Can someone ELI5 if the video with the magnet levitating is supposed prove something? Is this visual result only possible with superconductors? If so, why?
The levitation results from something called "diamagnetism" [1]. Diagmagnetism induces a magnetic field that opposes the original field; in this case it pushes the magnet away from the sample material.
All superconductors are strongly (perfectly, actually) diamagnetic, and its a classic cool demonstation of their properties. However, not all strongly diamagnetic things are superconductors. In fact, diagmagnetism is present in all materials, but it is usually swamped by other magnetic effects (ferromagnetism and paramagnetism).
Magnets can also levitate over other magnets, so it's not only possible with superconductors. But it does happen with superconductors. The magnet will induce a current in the superconductor, which creates a magnetic field, which repels the magnet.
Earnshaw's theorem describes why a free-floating (paramagnetic) magnet cannot levitate over another such magnet. There must be at least one stable axis which is not from a magnet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw%27s_theorem
> The magnet will induce a current in the superconductor
] Superconducting magnetic levitation is due to superdiamagnetism, which repels a permanent magnet which approaches the superconductor, and flux pinning, which prevents the magnet floating away.
] Superdiamagnetism is a feature of superconductivity.
So does that mean the video would exclude honest mistakes from the researchers? Either it is indeed a superconductor at room temperature or the makers of video actively faked the result.
> In both of these magnetic repulsion videos, keep in mind that magnetic repulsion and/or levitation are not, by themselves, probative of superconductivity: a diamagnetic material such as pyrolytic graphite [16], can be made to levitate [19] in a magnetic field without being superconductive.
I’m a noob when it comes to SC. Sorry to ask this question here and hope someone could explain. I can’t get any answer from Google.
What is the excitement around seeing floating magnets? My understanding is that we can have 2 regular magnets float if position them in opposite polarity, right?
No, you can't float a regular magnet above another magnet or any number of magnets, that is not stable (it can be proven mathematically). You can float a diamagnetic material but you need at least 2 magnets, it wouldn't be stable with only one either. Note however that in the video the material is not completely floating, one corner is touching, that would be enough to stabilise a diamagnetic material for example so it's not a sufficient proof of superconductivity by itself.
Basically, all of the electronical devices humanity uses, from nuclear power plants to smart watches, are about to get efficiency improvements in double digits. This is trillions of dollars per year, and a couple of degrees in average Earth temperature.
Unfortunately, this is not even close to correct. Resistive losses in wires are not the only cause of wasted energy, and in most battery-powered devices they aren't very important at all. How is a superconductor supposed to help with e.g. switching losses in a buck converter, or reduce the amount of energy stored in a transistor's gate capacitance?
> How is a superconductor supposed to help with e.g. switching losses in a buck converter
That one I can answer for you: because it would reduce the time to go from 'on' to 'off' due to the much more rapid flow on account of reduced resistance. The currents in a buck converter can be very high because they are short, but that is also exactly where you'll find the losses: in the transition from 'off' to 'on' and vice versa. So this won't do anything for the MOSFET losses but it could seriously shrink inductor losses and those are the other major factor.
Sure, the inductor conduction losses would go away (and that's a substantial improvement!), but I'm not sure what you're talking about with regard to reducing switching time. I don't think the MOSFET gate drive is limited by the wire that connects to it.
It isn't but the capacitor that is sitting on the far end of that circuit is limited by how fast you can pump current in or out. And if your current can go up considerably then the capacitor will charge that much faster and so your losses will be smaller because for the same 'on' duration of the MOSFET you can move more charge. Clearer now?
The output capacitor in a buck converter is charged through the inductor, whose current is continuous. I think we must be talking about different things.
I think they use a shard of the end of an ferrite loopstick antenna to fake the so called levitation. With some help, as seen in the video, it will orient itself in the field lines of the magnet.
What if the team itself did create LK-99 that is a superconductor, but they aren't able to reproduce it and only have the sample left that works. Hence, they aren't able to make more of it to prove their success, but rather decided to release the paper and method so that others can try to reproduce it. Given the amount of interest, they could put hundreds of labs to work trying to recreate what they themselves can't, hoping someone will find what they found and have an actual process for doing so?
I think it's unlikely in this case. They seem to have gone out of their way to show a method that can achieve replication using very common materials and pretty much medieval-grade technology (except for the vacuum pump, maybe).
Ok, if that's the case, why the imperfect demonstration? Why not dozens and dozens of videos showing such a monumental success in action? The lack of clear evidence, especially with social media frenzies, is a red flag in my opinion.
Ok, but if they said as much why then would people shift resources to try and 'rediscover' something that may take years? Not saying it, means people will pursue the fabrication more readily.
I heard your point nonetheless. It was just a question I asked in the larger thread and wanted more input. Thanks.
For context, Fefe is a rather famous German hacker and his blog serves as rumor mill for German nerds. So on one hand I wouldn't trust it that much, on the other hand it is precisely where I would expect knowledgeable people ranting about a bad paper anonymously. (And what they are saying sounds like the type of thing domain experts would pay attention to.)
"It should look like this" - until these guys made a scientific discovery and now it looks like this other different never before seen graph. This is hardly a proper rebuttal, expert opinion or not. We need these gents to try to replicate the results and then chime in. Otherwise it's just some dudes opinion. At one point the Earth was considered the center of our solar system.
Appreciate whatever this dude is trying to say in their blog, but judging by his writing style and overall presence and demeanor, he doesn't really want to be listened to, does he?
Interesting that the video of levitation isn't mentioned at all in this rebuttal.
Assuming the scientists acted in good faith and this isn't a complete scam, maybe we found something else that doesn't conform to our current understanding of superconductors, but does levitate over a magnetic field at ambient temp/pressure.
One response to the levitation video is that it is hard to distinguish from a non-superconductive diamagnetic effect, which can occur even in not very exotic materials.
There are videos of graphite levitating that are circulating, for example.
Jo (pronounced a bit like your without the r sound) is affirmative in lots of European languages, including Finnish and Czech (it's spelled joo in Finnish iirc)
True but that's a diphthong, "jo" is just a long(ish) o vowel sound. A lot of English dialects simply don't have an equivalent sound so it's hard to spell it. It's the IPA "o" or close to it. In my accent (south East England) "your" is pronounced almost identically to "jo".
In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire.
As far as HN's discussion goes, I'd say the community has been getting it right. The conversation has been curious and substantive, everyone knows it's probably not true, but most are not making shallow dismissals. There's a shared sense of waiting for the replications to succeed or fail, and in the meantime, discussion of the details as well as what the impact would be if it does turn out. Also driving interest is that the claims are said to be easy to replicate if true, so the answer is expected any time now. Imminence fuels anticipation—like waiting for election results.
The shallow dismissal reaction is taking for granted that it's not real and everyone's wrong to give it a chance. The thing is, almost everything is wrong—you can rely on this almost completely, and placing your bet on "wrong wrong wrong" achieves a high batting average—you'll be right almost all the time. The trouble is that your expected value will be zero, and you will be both bored and boring (I don't mean you personally—this is a common pattern and we all do it to some extent).
It's in the low-probability/high-impact quadrant that the interesting things reside, alongside crank material and dross, and it's not easy to tell them apart. That's natural. But one thing we can be sure of is that rejecting everything in that quadrant is a sure way to fail in the long run, and probably also to keep oneself in a bad mood.
I thought wow, what a substantive, insightful comment on HN, I need to save this one. And then I saw you wrote it! Glad you're the one running our madhouse, thank you.
This really nicely echoes a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky that I saw: if you always just play the odds on stuff like this, you're gonna be wrong about the real breakthroughs, which by definition defy the odds.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but I remain hopeful. All the theoretical critiques are extra interesting if this is real and the data is basically accurate.
What would the internet have gotten "wrong"? It's a paper and now people will try to replicate it. Some informed people give their take on why it sounds right and/or wrong, but ultimately they aren't (and can't) verify or debunk it yet pending further investigations. I have zero expertise to give an opinion either way, and honestly the impact of room temperature/pressure superconductors just doesn't seem that overwhelming. Maybe more maglev trains?
As with many things now, there are that small set of people who need to pick a "position" early and then stake a part of their ego on it. Which is super weird and destructive, and underlies many of the bad tendencies of the web.
It depends on the quench current, but yeah, maglev, hoverboards, much cheaper MRI machines, less reliance on the diminishing helium reserves, lower cost experimental fusion reactors and particle accelerators too. That last could lead to progress speeding up in that research as more people can try stuff. Lower cost for power transmission would make renewables that are geographically limited more usable. Also coil and rail guns would probably proliferate... If the quench current is high enough you could see handguns that charge on usb-c and are not legally firearms in any nation I'm aware of. Quite a disruptor.
This story deserves no more attention than the 10,000 crank papers submitted to Arxiv every day about time travel, prime numbers, antigravity. There is nothing worth replicating. That's what they got wrong.
Just like Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist claiming he's about to find ET. Or the MIT profs a few years ago who thought they could be billionaires with a naive bayes algo for trading bitcoin. Guess what they're doing now? Hint: still have dayjobs.
I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?
You can tell when someone shouldn't be listened to online if they feel a need to give a "take" to this piece of news. Just wait until we get actual results if you don't have a physics phd at minimum no need for any rushed take otherwise.
You're asking people not to be people. Having reactions and opinions and shooting the shit is what we do, and part of how we learn.
HN is an internet watercooler. It's natural and fine for people to talk about the latest interesting things—that's what this place is for, and there's no need to be right all the time.
Just for fun: Am I the only one who thinks there's connection between this and the UAP news that's coming out? RTSC would probably enable a lot of incredible energy & maneuverability capabilities...
Sorry, indulging in a little off-topic conspiracy theorizing.
David Grusch is literally talking heresay with zero first hand accounts. Heresay is not allowed in courts for a reason. Snowden blew the lid off an international conspiracy, and he had gigabytes of receipts.
Grusch has talked to people who work in information constrained spaces working on advanced materials with fancy codenames. If he was able to give literally any proof besides words coming out of his mouth and "trust me bro, they could be interdimensional", I would give him some credence, but there is nothing.
Agree that it's second-hand...and even he states this. What about the 11 hours of testimony he's provided privately to congress that includes specific names, companies, and locations? What about the first-hand witnesses that congress has heard from that back-up Grusch's claims?
I mean, there are some seemingly crazy accusations...but even if only some of them are accurate, they're worth looking in to. And if it's all false, it's still very interesting that so many trusted individuals are making such crazy claims. That is its own huge issue.
There's also his request for access to a S.C.I.F. (lnk below) in which to discuss more fully what he's alleging.
Complaining he didn't give up everything he knows on live TV/streaming seems a bit unfair as the guy was active military and wants to keep his clearance.
But they are unrelated in reality. In fact they are pretty uncorrelated in terms of timeline. This material has supposedly been waiting in the wings for a while.
We've known about superconductivity since 1911. For the sake of argument that Mussolini's UFO showed the way to "better" implementations of superconductivity, it wouldn't have taken this long if someone wanted to gradually leak it out, so I do think we did this all on our own.
Our society is build on a foundation of relatively cheap energy. Massive amounts of energy are built into the production of every item of food that reaches your fridge or item that reaches your closet. The unleashing of stored energy was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
If energy became 1000 or 1 million times cheaper, it would transform society. Global warming would be solved. Food would be solved. Water would be solved. Equal access to all materials goods would be solved. I’d personally be living in a Dr. Evil base on top of an alpine glacier that I myself re-froze. That or a floating city over the South Pacific.
None of this is any sort of explanation for "destabilizing society".
Even if nuclear fusion was perfected today it would take decades to build out and infrastructure would still be a big cost. That would take care of only electricity, not overall transportation.
I agree on AGI, but a massive step function shift in energy will certainly destabilize society. The livelihoods of at least a hundred million people depends on fossil fuels.
Superconductors are in the name. They're ideal conductors. As a corollary, superconductors coiled into a wire, shaped like an inductor, are also ideal inductors. By ideal, I informally mean nearly perfect in a mathematical sense.
A thin superconductor can carry an almost arbitrary amount of electricity with 0% loss. This is a real-world application already for superconductors, but it requires cooling the entire conductor to liquid helium temperature. (It's not truly limitless - enough current will eventually break down the superconducting effect - but ten billion watts down a 1 mm thick wire is doable.)
Similarly, an inductor made out of a superconductor, that is looped back on itself, can hold a magnetic field indefinitely, with 0% loss. Energy storage.
Also, novel ways of manipulating magnetic fields, and as a consequence of that, novel ways of manipulating radiation that interacts with magnetic fields. Really, anything that needs a strong magnetic field could benefit. Maglev trains. Portable MRI scanners would exist today, if the electromagnet didn't need to be submerged in liquid helium.
Superconducting computer circuits would dissipate no heat other than for the work required to physically change the state of the transistors. Power consumption could decrease by several orders of magnitude. Though to be honest, one day printing room-temperature superconductors lithographically is a rather unlikely prospect. But one can hope.
And some proposed realizations of quantum computing would benefit from small, extremely powerful magnets, while other proposed methods exploit the properties of superconductors directly (Josephson effect).
Superconductors operate within the bounds of their critical surface. The max current depends on the temperature and field density, it's never arbitrary.
superconductors can't carry arbitrary current. A lot yes, but dependent on the material, temperature, magnetic field, etc. And on the subject of the material, can it even be made into a wire? Is it stable? How much does it cost? So assuming it costs about the same as copper, what are the benefits? 0% loss, vs, maybe 10%? So the grid is 10% more efficient? I mean, that's definitely useful, but...
Again for energy storage, what's the energy density? How much does it cost, if it's even possible to configure for that use? It sounds like you expect to power a car from an AA-sized cell - not happening IMHO.
Microelectronics; Can you make IC's with this? What is the feature size? We now have 10^11 transistors on a chip, can this do that? How costly? Even if it can, what's the actual benefit? Just power-saving, or can this ramp up to terrahertz speeds? Again, IMHO, not happening, except maybe for a few specialized switching applications.
Super-strong magnetic fields? Ultra-sensitive magnetic detectors - OK, these make sense.
I mean ambient superconductors would be a major thing, useful across many fields, and perhaps creating entirely new capabilities, but let's not get carried away that suddenly climate change is fixed, fusion will happen tomorrow (It'll never happen economically, IMHO), we'll all be moving around on levitating chairs like Wall-E, powered by AAs, etc, etc.
I phrased it poorly - from an engineering standpoint, the amount of power a superconducting power line can carry is effectively limitless for practical purposes, in relation to the amount of material required. But yes, of course -- as I did say, eventually enough current flows that the magnetism induced breaks down the superconducting effect.
> what are the benefits? 0% loss, vs, maybe 10%?
With current lines, yes, rarely over 10% in practice. But what might be built without that barrier? There are many tens of gigawatts of undeveloped hydroelectric power in northern Canada, but that power has to be brought over some 5000 kilometres to New York or Chicago or Toronto. That can't currently be done. The losses are too high.
America's primary solar power generating regions in the future, likewise, appear to be far from the major cities.
> Again for energy storage, what's the energy density? How much does it cost, if it's even possible to configure for that use? It sounds like you expect to power a car from an AA-sized cell - not happening IMHO.
The energy density is too low for anything like domestic use. It will probably be most useful at grid scale. The economics may not work out.
> Again, IMHO, not happening, except maybe for a few specialized switching applications.
Switching at just under 1 THz has been demonstrated recently. Anyway, I agree. I already said as much -- "a rather unlikely prospect".
C'mon. I'm just excited about superconductors. They're cool! Except hopefully not anymore! I don't believe anything I said was factually wrong. Your primary gripe seems to be that I'm not sufficiently pessimistic about the likelihood of some of the possibilities. So -- room temperature superconductors are probably not real. And everything I spoke of must be understood as conjecture and hypothetical, with large and unknown variables, regarding things like the practical cost and material workability of the room temperature superconductors, which may not even be possible. Better?
Sure I'm excited too, it can improve many fields. I'm just more cynical about the theoretical applications versus the more likely grungy practical reality.
And a bit fed up with the hype - along with fusion it's been the holy grail, and presented as some kind of salvation, for 40 years or more.
Conceivably, though the power density of superconducting energy storage is very low and will likely remain low. It is currently used at grid-scale to smooth out power spikes, since they can charge/discharge their full capacity almost instantly.
> SMES is also used in utility applications. In northern Wisconsin, a string of distributed SMES units were deployed to enhance stability of a transmission loop. The transmission line is subject to large, sudden load changes due to the operation of a paper mill, with the potential for uncontrolled fluctuations and voltage collapse.
I'm afraid not, the magnetic field might be a bit too strong.
But for local/grid storage, it's perfect. Also, infinite magnets, this might allow for less neodymium in renewable. And probably dozen new applications we don't think of yet.
I said 3 years ago on this website that the only techno silver bullet I believed in against climate change was room-temperature superconductors, as this would help tremendously on
- interconnections,
- energy storage,
- efficiency,
And obviously help with plasma research, that would then help with both fusion and space catapult.
I was disappointed way too much by tech news in the last 10 years, but if this is true, I'd be really happy.
> I'm afraid not, the magnetic field might be a bit too strong.
I was always curious about that. The ability to hold extreme electrical currents means superconductors also produce extreme magnetic fields, which I presume will happily induce induction currents in whatever conductive material is nearby. If that material is non-superconductive, than it will start sapping the electromagnetic energy from said superconductor as the eddy currents get resisted, getting hot in the process.
What I guess I'm saying is that I'm not sure how you're supposed to build a superconductive grid or motor without also turning everything around it into an induction stove when you turn it on.
> than it will start sapping the electromagnetic energy from said superconductor
Electromagnetic induction involves the inductor, too. With a conventional electromagnet in a changing field, there is a current (an opposite current, in a sense) induced in the electromagnet's winding which is how the energy transfer occurs. The coil's apparent resistance increases as it moves through the field. But superconductors have no resistance :)
Since a superconductor rejects induction from outside magnetic fields (Meissner effect) they do not inductively couple in the same way. Once energized and then looped, a superconducting magnet behaves more like a permanent magnet.
With regard to use in power storage, strong magnets of any kind are rather inconvenient (even dangerous) around anything magnetic.
> Similarly, an inductor made out of a superconductor, that is looped back on itself, can hold a magnetic field indefinitely, with 0% loss. Energy storage.
Could this be used to make a bomb?
If the new material really is as easy to manufacture as it seems, could homegrown terrorists easily create WMDs?
Yes they can be used to make a multistage electromagnetic pulse device but room temperature superconductors wouldn't really make it that much easier. Definitely not easy enough for a non-state actor to make one.
The amount of current generated during the first stage of an EMP detonation is so high it ablates the coil away, which wouldn't happen with superconducting wires. However, it wouldn't protect it against the explosive used to generate the magnetic field, which is the biggest challenge.
I don’t understand how superconductors will make phones into supercomputers. There is a still the limitation of the number of transistors in a given volume.
"The most probable candidate material is yttrium barium copper oxide, with a design temperature of 20 K, allowing various coolants (e.g. liquid hydrogen, liquid neon, or helium gas) instead of the much more complicated liquid helium refrigeration chosen by ITER."
Before the node-size race we also had the clock-speed race. Eventually it was common for processors reach 2-4ghz, and after that the clock speed gains stopped being practical because as you increase clock speed you also increase energy requirements and heat.
I think the implication is that clock-speed could start increasing again. It would probably require a completely new manufacturing process, but if we assume this superconductor is legit, perhaps an older process could manufacture it.
If so, maybe we could have (just spitballing here, I have no idea) 28nm super conducting CPUs that run at a 1thz instead of 4ghz. That would be quite an improvement over today's CPUs, even with fewer transistors, I think.
There are other losses and limitation in increasing clock-speeds aside from just resistive losses, but I think they are a significant part of the current bottleneck. Other losses involve transistor switching losses, and inductive losses but I don't really know the details, and I think those details change with superconductors.
We stopped chasing clock speeds because of the physical timing limitations of gate and signal propagation. Not because of heat. Suppose you are using a 5GHz clock. Every cycle is 0.2ns. Light can only travel 6cm in that time. Electricity propagates a little slower through a conductor (and even slower through silicon). So if you are using some insanely fast clock, you are just wasting cycles waiting for signals to move across the chip.
Current processors are no longer synchronous, each part now works asynchronously and there can be several instructions waiting to be completed at once, average Intructions Per Clock are already over 1, so there is no problem waiting a little more for signal to propagate.
Superconductors can make very powerfull lossless conductors, and therefore powerfull magnetic fields. Which is great if you need to contain a fusion reaction. Also not needing to cool one side to near 0k and the hot side to millions of degrees helps viability of fusion.
Processors basacally convert almost all power into heat by resistive losses. With room temparature superconductors you'll only consume energy on the state changes of the processor.
With this superconductive material you could create loops of wire (like a resistor) but instead it would store energy practically lossless in a few seconds.
Superconductivity up to 100c and 1bar would be a historic moment in human ingenuity.
Maybe it will be the thing that gives the US a nudge towards building a high speed train network. Commodity maglev would be generational leap over existing high speed rail. It would be an economic driver for the US, and take a lot of planes out of the sky, and even freight off the roads.
I can't remember the last time a new technology became widely available that wasn't somehow used against us. There's always a catch. New products are often designed to work on behalf of people other than the "owner", and often are designed to prevent the "owner" from being able to do what they want with the product.
Someone posted a ChatGPT answer, which seems a pretty good response:
Energy Efficiency: Superconductors conduct electricity without resistance, which means they don't produce heat as a byproduct. This could make electronic devices more energy-efficient and help them run cooler, which could extend battery life in mobile devices and potentially reduce the need for cooling in larger devices like computers.
Processing Speed: Superconducting circuits could potentially operate at higher speeds than conventional circuits, which could lead to faster processors and more powerful computers and smartphones.
Data Storage: Superconductors could also be used to create more efficient and compact data storage devices. For example, they could be used in the development of Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM), a type of non-volatile memory that uses magnetic states to store information. This could potentially offer faster and more energy-efficient data storage than current technologies.
Quantum Computing: Superconductors are already used in some types of quantum computers, which use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations much more quickly than conventional computers. A room-temperature superconductor could make quantum computers more practical and affordable, which could have a profound impact on many areas of technology and science.
Power Transmission: Superconductors can transmit electricity without any loss, which could dramatically increase the efficiency of power grids. This could reduce energy costs, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and make renewable energy sources more viable.
Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) Trains: Superconductors can produce powerful magnetic fields, which can be used to levitate trains above their tracks, reducing friction and allowing for higher speeds. Current maglev trains already use superconductors, but they require cooling to very low temperatures, which is expensive and energy-intensive. Room-temperature superconductors could make maglev trains more practical and affordable.
Medical Imaging and Therapy: Superconductors are used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines to generate the strong magnetic fields required for imaging. Room-temperature superconductors could make MRI machines cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible. They could also be used in other medical technologies, such as particle beam therapies for cancer treatment.
Scientific Research: Superconductors are used in a variety of scientific instruments, such as particle accelerators and detectors. Room-temperature superconductors could make these instruments more efficient and less expensive to operate.
Electric Vehicles (EVs): Superconductors could be used to make more efficient electric motors and batteries for electric vehicles, potentially increasing their range and reducing their cost.
Telecommunications: Superconductors could be used to create more efficient and higher-capacity communication networks, potentially improving internet speeds and reducing latency.
Aerospace and Defense: Superconductors could be used in a variety of aerospace and defense applications, such as advanced radar systems, satellite technologies, and even propulsion systems.
With apologies for being the pedantic person, you're not really asking the AI in your pocket. You're just using the web browser on your pocket computer to compose a message to the massive AI system running in some datacenter somewhere.
Ironically, if this problem does get solved, you could have the whole AI system in your pocket.
I'd dispute the 'dramatically' more efficient power grids, unless that's couched in industry terms - ie a 10% reduction in transmission losses might be 'dramatic' for energy grid engineers. But not really world-changing, for the rest of us.
"Aerospace and Defense: Superconductors could be used in a variety of aerospace and defense applications, such as advanced radar systems, satellite technologies, and even propulsion systems."
OK, now we're getting somewhere. What new capabilities?
Think of all the workarounds that we have to use to offset the waste heat and signal degradation of electricity (everywhere, including your computer/phone), and now imagine those things not existing.
This assumes superconducting wires everywhere. I don't really see it happenning in microelectronics for example. You'd have to replace the entire silicon ecosystem with this new material. Not happening soon, probably never.
But sure, for specific applications an increase to 'near 100%' efficiency could have important secondary effects, eliminating heat-sinks, etc.
SQUID sensors would be very feasible, with increased sensitivity. I just learned that extremely directional transceivers would be possible due to some weird quantum effects. Probably propulsion would be affected by higher efficiency motors. So it's a huge deal if it's real.
Actually, going from 96-98% to 99% is still huge. Assume the lower efficiency motor is 100W. You waste 2-4. Presumably you can dissipate that amount of heat.
Now, the same form factor can do 200-400W and be ok.
So it doesn't change the efficiency of the system (we still use a bunch of wh) but it dramatically changes the form factor of the motor!
Maybe around the edges, but existing weapons are plenty destructive and many of them do not operate in an electronic regime except for control systems. Rail guns would probably get more effective but they're still not really all that useful and lasers might get more effective but again not really a material change to the battlefield, only an incremental one.
It's hard to develop a technology that can't be used by the military in some capacity but as such things go this one seems substantially more useful to everyone than useful to militaries.
I thought there was something about waste heat being a problem in outer space, so if this fixes that it could open the door for space-based laser weapons and other terrible things. GDI Ion Cannon when?
I understand where you're coming from - breakthroughs in the lab often take years or decades to make their way into the public space, if they do at all - but to clarify: the synthesis procedure for LK-99 is simple enough that many labs can make a sample in a week. In fact, there are several parties attempting synthesis in public as we speak.
If this is real, you're going to know about it very soon.
My issue here is: This new material is essentially standard "high temperature" YBCO superconductor material just slightly modified, or? The authors are not doing anything dramatically new, like a new chemistry.
How likely is it that all the other 1000s of labs doing research on this topic just missed this lucky combination of baking, cooling and whatnot?
No, there's no YB and they propose an entirely novel mechanism for how generic metals (a whole host of possible combinations) can achieve superconductivity in these conditions. At least check out the formula or open the link.
> modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure
> The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+ (2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress.
> Pb10(PO4)6O
It's just Lead, Phosphorus and Oxygen all the way.
> My issue here is: This new material is essentially standard "high temperature" YBCO superconductor material just slightly modified, or? The authors are not doing anything dramatically new, like a new chemistry.
AIUI The only thing in common is they both contain copper.
Not an expert either, and extremely skeptical myself. The poor videos claiming to demonstrate levitation just seemed to show diamagnetism and eddy current reactions.
The space of possible combinations of just three different elements of the periodic table is huge. This is before you get into added dimensions of processing, ratios of each element to the others, different possible crystal structures, etc.
To create such a dramatic increase in critical temperature, I would expect you need a dramatic change in chemistry (as in: formula, materials,...) as well.
Well, last time I had some hope for room temperature superconductors that was with doped fullerenes (C60 and friends). That was a truly novel approach.
People are quick to dismiss astrology, but the last time Pluto entered Aquarius (which will happen for the next 20 years starting in Dec) we had the Industrial Revolution. The time before that we had the Scientific Revolution. Things are right on track with this discovery.
That's a great question that nobody knows the answer to.
Again, the last time this planet was positioned as such radical technological world-changing innovation happened (Industrial Revolution). Rewind a few hundred years, and we see it happen again (Scientific Revolution). Another revolution is incoming.
I doubt I'm going to convince you of anything. But it is nonsensical to think that the position of the planets have any effect on people. You see a correlation in two data points and are extrapolating it, despite having no explanation as to why that would be the case. If you have an explanation as to why the position of Pluto would affect the development of technology, I would love to hear it.
Not optimistic about replication in the next week too, Solid State Synthesis seems "easy" but in my experience can be problematic. Not an expert in that part though