42 ms·
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
- drsopp 3y agoCan you make a practical battery with such a superconductor?
- dvaun 3y agoSee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
- Akronymus 3y agoI severly doubt that it is an actual room temperature superconductor, but would love to hear the opinions of more well informed people on that topic.
- mightykipper 3y ago127°C, so it is room temperature if you first set your room alight.
- Akronymus 3y agoFrom my understanding it is superconductive up to that temp. So, superconductive at room temp and even further.
- dspillett 3y agoThat makes me even more sceptical. In recent years confirmed discovery of superconducting materials have gone from working at best up to ~100K below room temperature to at best a few 10s of K below. To jump to a material that claims to exhibit superconductivity as far as >100K above room temperature, at ambient pressure too, is an extraordinary claim and so needs to be presented with extraordinary evidence.
- scarmig 3y agoI mean, the paper has experimental results and it should be easily reproducible by pretty much any lab. Do you think they should be hopping on CNN to give a public demonstration with the announcement? If a material with the properties described actually exists, this paper is exactly the kind of announcement and evidence we'd want for it.
- dspillett 3y agoNo, I agree with you that a quiet “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please reproduce or tell us if you find something we've misinterpreted”, rather than a public fanfare, is how a potential scientific breakthrough should be done IMO. I think I cross-pollinated this thread with another where someone was asking “if this is true why isn't it on the front pages”. The extraordinary evidence I'd want before it hits the front pages and TV talk shows is other scientific/engineering groups managing to reproduce the findings, or at least showing a significant improvement over previous discoveries (there could be a mistake that means the result isn't that big a thing while still leaving room for it to be a significant finding).
- Maxion 3y agoBut this is exactly the quiet please reproduce? It's a preprint posted to arxiv, with a very easy to follow material synthesis process in the supplemental materials section?
- scarmig 3y agoIn fairness, the paper isn't exactly humble about its claims. But I appreciate their candor, and if they believe they've found a RTP superconductor and sufficiently verified it is a RTP superconductor, a bit of arrogance isn't unwarranted.
- dspillett 3y ago> But this is exactly Yep. But that doesn't stop me being sceptical of such a jump in success (from tens of K below room to tens+ above at ambient pressure) which is where this sub-that started. As already stated ("I think I cross-pollinated this thread with..." in the post you replied to) I confused things by mixing replies to different posts in the same place.
- alsaaro 3y agoThe critical temperature (Tc) >= 400 K or about 127 C, so apparently this material requires relatively high heat to reach superconductivity. This is unusual, superconductivity is a low temperature phenomenon. Recently though, other researches have claimed room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, but low temperatures.
- sfink 3y agoUh no, I'm pretty confident they are just saying that whatever the Tc is, it's at least 127°C. I don't think they're redefining Tc to mean that it superconducts above that temperature. That would be... interesting. "You can't run across this bridge without falling? Here, I'll have an elephant bounce up and down on one end, that'll make it easier!"
- tyre 3y agoAll server farms are now in Death Valley.
- carabiner 3y agoVideo shows him handling the superconductor with thin latex gloves.
- noiv 3y agoI share your doubt, but on the other hand I wonder why? Could you tell how a breaking message of this magnitude should be decorated to make all doubts go away?
- mlyle 3y agoIt might be broken in an unreviewed preprint like this. But there will likely be very many bogus preprints for each true extraordinary finding. Therefore most things showing up like this are untrue.
- dspillett 3y ago> Could you tell how a breaking message of this magnitude should be decorated to make all doubts go away? You'll never make all doubt go away on a new extraordinary discovery, mainly because most claims of an extraordinary discovery turn out to be mistakes (like the FTL neutrino thing a while ago that turned out to be a wiring fault that caused a minute timing error) or occasionally fabrications. A quiet publication of “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please try reproduce or tell us what you think we've misinterpreted” is the way it should go. Unfortunately too subtle a release would be at risk of being ignored, and on the other side you get the mad public press and massive recriminations when it turns out a mistake was made and the finding is not reproducible (like the cold fusion thing I remember from the late 80s).
- doctorwho42 3y agoThe cold fusion people were actively touting data that didn't align to known fusion reactions. Like there are a limited number of elements one can fuse, but for some reason their reaction (which is known) had the energy off by like 300-400 KeV. For example: a proton signal of 2.6 MeV instead of the known 3MeV signal.
- amerine 3y agoWasn't there some recent excitement about some hydrogen sulfide superconductor thing? But the pressure required was wild/not-useful-for-use or something like that?
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, H2S is superconducting at higher temperatures than anything else up to that point (but still well below zero), but it required very high pressure making it impractical for a lot of applications.
- otikik 3y agoHuge if true.
- allenrb 3y agoIf this were true, I would’ve expected to see it on the front page of the New York Times, not hiding in a scientific journal. Color me skeptical, with a hint of optimism.
- fulafel 3y agoMainstream press doesn't have the ability to replicate physics research results you may indeed first get the results in a journal. It can take some time before the research community manages to decide if something replicates or not. But there doesn't seem to be any indication in the link that this has been published in a peer reviewed journal, or received kinds of community peer review, either.
- Schiphol 3y agoAFAICT this has not yet been published in a scientific journal, and has not passed peer review of any sort. Having said that, there's been at least one story on HN this past week where researchers were chastised for going to the press before properly vetting their results.
- Mizza 3y agoIt seems to have been published in a Korean journal: http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=ART002955269 http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=A...
- mercurywells 3y agoBack in April and there's been no other cites of it since then?
- Maxion 3y agoIt's very common to post papers to arxiv while at the same time submitting the paper to a journal.
- elashri 3y agoAlmost all research are published in scientific journal. News outlets then pick some to report deepening on many factors from breakthrough development to just pure chance. So this is not something strange. Actually the opposite is the strange. I would be skeptical of any group the report something in media before publishing the results in a journal (or arxiv like this case). This is not to say anything about this particular paper. I still have to read it eventually.
- foxhill 3y agobig if true. far from a chemistry expert here, but synthesis looks basically trivial (if you consider 10e-5 torr vacuum to be trivial), and the materials are readily available. hell, from the instructions alone i could probably make it at home. i mean the search space is unfathomably large, so i suppose it’s possible that something like this exists, but the paper quality itself doesn’t.. spark joy? :) i’ll maintain a healthy level of skepticism until some real materials scientists opine and/or someone else is able to reproduce.
- Akronymus 3y agoYeah, thats about what I expected. This seems way too good to be true. But hope that it actuaoly is true.
- ragebol 3y agoIf it's true, it'll also SPARC joy. And ITER etc
- foxhill 3y agowell.. my understanding is that the difficulty with those projects is converting fast moving neutrons into electricity without degrading the material.. :) but a room-temperature superconductor would certainly lower the operating costs of all of the prototype fusion reactors that currently exist.
- lordnacho 3y agoYou can just make the thing they claim is superconducting? No special requirements? I guess this will be replicated/not pretty soon then.
- roomey 3y agoThis would change the world of it was true
- lokl 3y agoWill they invite a wide range of experts to publicly test their material?
- postmortembees 3y agoThe instructions they provide in the paper seem fairly straightforward and reproducible, I'd expect that if this is in fact legit, there will be many attempts to replicate the result quite quickly.
- lokl 3y agoThanks for commenting, as I'm not qualified to evaluate this. Authors providing such instructions should be commended, even if their result turns out to be false due to errors in measurement or interpretation.
- idiotsecant 3y agoThis stuff is the materials science equivalent of making a baking soda volcano, in terms of difficulty. If their results are BS we will know quite quickly. I have no doubt people are attempting to reproduce their results right now. If they wanted to get the credit for a BS discovery they definitely could have picked something harder to reproduce. They're making a very easily verifiable or falsifiable claim.
- giarc 3y agoThat's a good way of putting it. If you are a fraud, why make it so easy for someone to call your bluff.
- floxy 3y agoLet's hope so. The easiest way to convince the world that you have a room temperature superconductor is to make up a big batch of samples and offer to distribute them to national labs for testing. First test, does it levitate a small permanent magnet, demonstrating diamagnetism?
- slashdev 3y agoThis is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.
- alsaaro 3y agoThey claim to have observed the Meisner effect, quantum locking unique to superconductors, a pretty big signal, so more likely fraud than a mistake.
- sfink 3y agoYes, normally when people come up with some BS about room temperature superconducting, they really just mean they've observed one of the indirect effects of superconductivity. "If you put an ohmmeter in my funky circuit, it displays zero!" Which usually just means you've come up with a clever way to break an ohmmeter. Ejecting the magnetic field (the Meissner effect) is a way better sign. I find it very hard to believe that this could be true, but at least they're measuring the right things.
- giarc 3y agoHow long do you think it'll take for the scientific community to determine whether this is fraud, error or the real deal?
- scarmig 3y agoLess than a week. It's a simple material to synthesize, and the tests conducted on it are pretty typical with effect sizes that don't require any sophisticated statistics to observe.
- rotexo 3y agoYeah, very probably fraud. Only puzzle is why they would choose something so easy for other labs to try (and fail) to replicate.
- mepian 3y agoIs "Quantum Energy Research Centre, Inc." a well-known institution in its field?
- mynameisbob 3y agoIt doesn’t need to be well known IMO. It just needs to be legitimate and by appearances it is given it is part of a major SK university.
- mepian 3y agoI'm just curious, not trying to dismiss it.
- westurner 3y agoRoom-temperature superconductor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto... Superconducting quantum computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_comput...
- beanjuice 3y agoThere was another in the same day [0], funny. Maybe it really did happen. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
- svnt 3y agoTwo of the authors are the same. A little odd.
- moh_maya 3y agoI mean- not really? They have developed / synthesized the material, and they collaborated with another lab that had the skills and equipment to conduct and interpret specific experimental techniques and results. Fairly common, especially in life sciences, and I suspect chemistry and materials science. Added in edit: This doesn’t make the result any more or less credible; for that, the true test is independent replication of both the synthesis as well as the experimental measurements. But the fact that the two authors published two papers with different groups is orthogonal to whether the result is real / an experimental error / fraud. I so hope its true - but..lets wait for replication and validation by other qualified experts :)
- botro 3y agoI think they also make mention of the other paper in the one being discussed, pages 12,13: "The Additional experimental results and discussions on LK-99 will be published immediately in the next paper, including an interesting controllable levitation phenomenon and the coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity, theoretical calculation, etc."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danbruc 3y agoAfter skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bit less legitimate to me and they could of course always have some error in there setup. The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the superconductivity. Probably because it is only a thin film, the material could only support about 250 mA at 25°C before losing superconductivity. So even if the paper is correct, it might turn out to be challenging to get to higher currents. Or maybe not and one could just roll up a wide thin film and have as much amps as one likes. EDIT: I misread the thin film thing, they also produced a thin film but primarily they describe the material testes as follows without any dimensions I could immediatly spot. After the reaction, a dark gray ingot was obtained reproducibly and then made into the shape of thin cuboids for electrical measurements [...]
- postmortembees 3y agoYeah, it seems like (to me, a naive layperson) to be similar to how a prince rupert's drop exerts strong forces thanks to the mechanism of its cooling/shape. The copper somehow forcing other structures to form in an atypical way which enables the superconductivity. And even at 250mA, there'd be tons of different usecases for a superconductor.
- barelyauser 3y agoIt is not limited to 250mA overall. A physically larger specimen would be capable of more current.
- danbruc 3y agoI got this wrong, they also produced a thin film in addition to bulk material. And my worry was that one could maybe not easily scale this up in case the effect relied on it being a thin film in which case you can only make ever so wide before it becomes impractical or you have to layer or fold the thin film which might also be problematic. But as I said, I just read this wrong.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoWould lead-apatite be amenable to creating wires out of it?
- TNorthover 3y agoDoesn’t matter how amenable it is, if it’s a room temperature superconductor wires will be made out of it. We’d make wires out of jelly for that.
- BariumBlue 3y agoOhh ... this could actually be relatively big. From abstract: "The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage" There was previously research done investigating how changes in atomic structural alignment affect superconductivity (such as by cooling). I think researchers were trying to maintain the spacing that superconductors had while cool even when it was heated up. This sounds line with that other research, though I can't find the article again, please correct me if you find otherwise. Still likely to be rather fragile and temperamental to work with ... but this seems like it's possibly legit.
- LastMuel 3y agoIs this the prior post you’re referencing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479776
- BariumBlue 3y agoYes! That was exactly what I was thinking of! I love one of the comments - "But might this physical stretching then also allow room temperature superconductors, if not why not?" They were thinking of stretching at a macro scale (like bending a bar of stuff), rather than essentially "stretching" at the chemical scale which is what I understand they did here. Super cool!
- NamTaf 3y agoIt gets even better. fwlr, in a comment further down that thread, expands: > I think the “tension axis” is more likely to be fruitful in a different way, where we find some structure e.g. a crystalline formation that happens to hold atoms apart with just the right amount of tension. But this is all very speculative - the “tension axis” is just a random thought I had while reading the article! They hit the nail on the head pretty well, I’d say! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36487946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36487946
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 3y agoIf manufacturable at scale, does this allow for MRI machines that could operate without perpetual consumption of liquid helium?
- sigy 3y agoYes
- maccam912 3y agoAs someone who knows more about words than superconductors, gentle correction in case it is an actual misunderstanding instead of misspeaking, but a correctly running MRI shouldn't ever CONSUME the liquid helium, it would recycle as much as possible. But as a newly self-proclaimed expert on superconductors as well, yeah this would probably help MRIs. My understanding is that the reason for superconductors in MRIs is so that the wires doing the electricity stuff don't interfere with the small electrical responses from the tissue it's measuring. Without resistance, you don't get magnetic fields around the wires or something.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoLiquid helium is very sneaky stuff. Sure, they try to keep it in as much as they can (it's expensive!) but it's gonna leak eventually. A quick web search indicates that MRIs in common use lose 1-6% of their helium per month.
- willis936 3y agoAnd potentially reduce the cost of fusion reactors by tens of percent.
- foota 3y agoSo who has got the setup and wants to test this for us? :)
- sheepscreek 3y agoOne of the authors in a related paper[1] is Hyun-Tak Kim. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals[2]. One even has > 1500 citations[3]. I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon. 1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf 2. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&hl=en 3. Mott transition in VO2 revealed by infrared spectroscopy and nano-imaging: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&citation_for_view=_P8mux4AAAAJ:u5HHmVD_uO8C https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
- PaulHoule 3y agoUnlike those guys in Rochester, this seems to be a good experiment that is testing many of the signs of superconductivity.
- amluto 3y agoThe actual picture of (poor) levitation in the paper you linked is pretty compelling. This isn’t a complex, noisy measurement showing something that’s related to superconductivity — this is a magnet and a supposed superconductor repelling each other. As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t notice), electrets (seems pretty unlikely here), very extreme amounts of static charge (again, seems unlikely), and actual superconductivity (would be awesome). Random bits of cooked oxides, ceramics, and such don’t float on a magnet.
- scarmig 3y agoTheir other data doesn't line up with ferromagnetism, though. It's either the real thing or a big fraud. Guess we'll find out soon enough. ETA: the video referenced is apparently available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k . Interestingly, posted on Feb 26, 2023.
- telltruth 3y agoCould someone explain why is this world changing?
- unethical_ban 3y agoI believe MRIs use superconductivity, so I assume any application of superconductors that doesn't require heavy, large, energy-consuming cooling will benefit greatly. Perhaps MRIs will become ubiquitous and cheap, something we all get every time we go to the doctor? Superconduction also has some weird magnetic properties I believe, so there could be benefits regarding maglev transport. And finally and most basically, the movement of electrical energy across potentially large distances with zero loss would be a great thing.
- fluidcruft 3y agoI have no real idea what I'm talking about but figure 1 has critical magnetic flux curve ranging up to 3000 Oe so... in MRI-speak maybe it tops out before 0.3T? IIRC permanent magnet MRI have already been built in the 0.3T range, but they're very heavy and outclassed by the higher-field scanners. Clinical MRI nowadays typically runs at 1.5-3T (with some clinical scanners at 5-7T). Having said that there is a resurgence of interest in low-field MRI lately, primarily marketed for use in developing nations and for combination machines that integrate radiation therapy. From what I've heard from diagnostic radiologists, the low-field MRI scanners seem to be of limited diagnostic value on their own. Anyway that's just my thought that the best/first applications here may not be about generating magnetic fields.
- cassepipe 3y agoI read that as an overly conservative cry :D
- traverseda 3y agoSuperconductors are basically perfectly conductive wire. Wires that transfer 100% of power over arbitrary distances and that don't heat up. Obviously there are limits, you can't put arbitrary power over a hair thin filament but as long as you're under that limit you get perfect efficiency. MRI machines can be made a lot simpler as you no longer need to use liquid nitrogen to cool the superconductors. MRI machines could end up being small and cheap. Perfectly efficient electromagnets make a lot of problems in fusion reactors simpler, I'm not sure that room temperature superconductors make fusion reactors instantly viable but it's a big step and would reduce the energy requirements for a fusion bottle by a lot. Basically anything involving electromagnets becomes a lot more efficient. Motors can be made smaller, generators can be made much more efficient for the weight, maglev trains can require very little power to hover. It has effects on almost every industrial process as it fundamentally changes the weight and energy efficiency of anything involving electromagnets. One neat things would be surgical robots that can work as an MRI while also levitating a small blade in a 3D space. Challenging for sure but when you can replace complicated liquid-nitrogen cooled coils with an array of simple passive coils a lot of options open up. Superconductors can also be used for power storage, and at room temperature that becomes a lot more viable. Here's this big wikipedia page on applications of superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_... Also on the less useful side, rail guns.
- GordonS 3y agoI see lots of comments saying this is a huge deal if true. Can I ask... well, why? What can we do/make with this?
- Rhapso 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene... Basically really high density batteries that work efficiently forever, zero friction bearings via levitation, zero resistance long haul energy transport, and an MRI you can probably run on household current. Plus maximally efficient (not perfect efficiency just the best we could theoretically practically get) energy storage, transport, generation, and conversion back to motion.
- voldacar 3y agoThe graphs on page 3 are exactly what you would expect with a real superconductor. The current/voltage/temp relationship especially. In fact I don't see how you get graphs that look like that unless you either created a superconductor or are just blatantly making up the data. This could be enormous.
- icodestuff 3y agoMy first thought was “I really hope this is real and not someone having left the data collection software in simulation mode.” If this reproduces, it’s historic. If it doesn’t, it’s either cold fusion or faster-than-light neutrinos.
- intrasight 3y agoThe Sagan standard is the adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (a concept abbreviated as ECREE). But one can hope such evidence is forthcoming. And if it is, then short the oil majors.
- hatsunearu 3y agosuperconductivity isn't really "extraordinary" though, the evidence to tell whether superconductivity is happening is relatively mundane.
- abtinf 3y agoOr go long—such a breakthrough would radically increase demand for energy.
- nine_k 3y agoDepending on the expense of making the new material, it may become actually feasible to build solar panels across Sahara and feed both Africa and Europe with the electricity generated, because transmission will become lossless and physically compact.
- WanderPanda 3y agoGeopolitically infeasible, look at the mayhem caused by nord stream alone
- nine_k 3y agoMaybe it could be a stabilizing factor, because the many interests involved would be mostly aligned. However unstable Middle East is, most of the time no oil well is on fire, or in a war zone.
- WanderPanda 3y agoIt is not about the steady state being unstable on its own, it is about how easily it can be brought out of equilibrium with a very small force (of a hand full of people). An inherent flaw in the centralized nature of such a system
- k2xl 3y agoCan someone explain like I'm five why this is "huge if true"?
- joquarky 3y agoIf this is true, superconductors will become practical in everyday items.
- BizarroLand 3y agoIf you're not sure what a superconductor is, basically anything that conducts electricity has resistance in it. That resistance turns the energy that is being transmitted through the conductor into heat, essentially wasting it for useful purposes unless you're running a hair dryer or oven. For instance, one of the reasons why power plants have to be near the cities they serve, aside from practical logistics, is that if you send electricity over power lines, you lose some of that electricity to the resistant line drop, the voltage decreases over time, and ultimately you could lose all of your usable power to heat. However, that changes when superconductors come into play. Many power plants already use them for short distances where the heat is high and the line drop is also high, but if you replaced every power line in America with superconducting lines a power plant in Florida could sell extra spare power to Alaska with no loss between the two plants. (This is in theory, it is still likely that there would be losses where the lines are split and connected, but that would still be far less than the greater than 100% voltage loss over 7,000 miles of traditional copper lines that you would expect.) Room temperature superconductors would provide many benefits aside from power transmission as well. Electric vehicles would be more efficient with power coils made from them, allowing more of the electricity from the batteries to be turned directly into vehicle movement. Cell phones would heat up less with superconducting wires, losing less of their battery power to heat and lasting longer. Computers would run longer. CPUs would heat up less, requiring less cooling to operate at higher speeds and less power to run closer to the atomic limit of processing. If it is proven that this works, then we may be very close to the system by which superconductivity works, and solving that may allow for hundreds or thousands of compounds exhibiting superconductivity to be made for myriad applications, allowing for us to live closer to the way we tend to while being a bit greener in the process.
- swayvil 3y agoThis is huge. I am stunned and advise withholding judgment until further evidence arrives. My second thought, how does it respond to magnetic fields?
- WizardClickBoy 3y agoHolding... But I do so badly want this to be true.
- swayvil 3y agoMe too.
- obblekk 3y agoThe method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals). If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days. If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster. Hopefully it repros. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf page 3
- Maxion 3y agoYou need a furnace that can hold a vacuum, though.
- local_issues 3y agoThere's a surprising number of them around. I think the bottleneck for quick repro will be mat sci people, not equipment.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> need a furnace that can hold a vacuum Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE
- overnight5349 3y agoIn the paper, they sealed the material in a quartz ampuole under vacuum. I wouldn't call it an easy process, but it's achievable without highly specialized equipment. Just a torch and a vacuum pump.
- MisterTea 3y agoThose are easy to make.
- deleted 3y ago
- kridsdale3 3y agoWhich business do I invest in assuming this is real and has IP protection? It would be like buying Intel in 1971 or getting shares in Edison in 1878.
- cguess 3y agoThe companies that are licensing the tech. Unfortunately that'll be the big names so you're already pretty heavily priced out of a serious buy. There will be small startups around the world to working on smaller, less-sexy applications (medical implants come to mind since the power requirements for batteries would bottom out) that you very well could make a lot of money in, but there won't be an Edison here, the world is too diversified already and this is a new version of existing tech, not something new. Who knows though, maybe we'll be able to finally launch ships into space without rockets?
- megaman821 3y agoThis isn't the IP you want. The IP you are looking for is the process that can take this discovery and turn into miles a superconducting wire a day.
- concurrentsquar 3y agoThis is the patent of the superconductor: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO2023027536A1 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO202... No company listed. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869088
- Geee 3y agoInsane if true. Unlocks a completely new chapter for the human tech tree.
- carabiner 3y agoThis is too soon. We don't even have monopole magnets but we have superconductor fusion powered AGI. This will destabilize society.
- notfish 3y agoMonopole magnets probably aren’t allowable in our current understanding of physics since the magnetic field is just a consequence of a relativistic E-field.
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- Night_Thastus 3y agoThis is almost certainly a mistake at best or completely bogus at worst. Reminds me a bit of that situation with someone who claimed they had evidence of successful human cloning - when it turned out all their results were lies. If it is true, it would be a revolution for nearly every field. So I certainly hope I'm wrong!
- dudley96 3y agoits been 4 months since they first synthesized it !
- foota 3y agoIf true, this should dramatically improve the timeline for practical fusion energy, right?
- jjk166 3y agoNot necessarily. While obviously it would be nice to not have to cool superconductors, it's not much of a technical challenge. Much more relevant is the strength of the magnets - fusion reactors need very strong magnets which is why they use superconductors, but there is still a limit to how strong they can be made. Unfortunately the higher temperature a material becomes a superconductor, typically the less able it is to handle strong magnetic fields. The extent depends on the type of material it is and there can be other benefits like smaller size that could justify using weaker magnets, so it is still possible it could help, but it's unlikely to be a game changer.
- foota 3y agoAh interesting, thank you! Maybe I can hope that the discovery leads to further novelty then :) Maybe the same effect can occur in lower temperature superconductors as well. I guess there's a sweet spot for ease of construction, field strength, and temperature.
- pfdietz 3y agoIf you look at the 2013 design of the ARC fusion reactor concept (a high field tokamak), most of the mass of the reactor is the steel structure needed to resist the JxB forces from the magnets. This will be needed even if the magnets are made of room temperature resublimated unobtainium.
- eig 3y agoA sister paper [0] has a photo of the material exhibiting the Meisner effect and levitating over a magnet, and claims to have a video too. Either they blatantly photoshopped the photo or they actually made a room temperature super conductor. I can’t see how the could have made a subtle mistake that resulted in magnetic levitation at room temp without making a superconductor. [0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
- swagmoney1606 3y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
- jacquesm 3y agoIndeed, this will change pretty much everything if true. A true room temperature / ambient pressure superconductor will cause a revolution in so many fields that I find it hard to believe. But if... Let's wait for replication before throwing a party. This is on par with the discovery of the transistor and possibly bigger.
- colechristensen 3y agoSuperconductors have a current limit above which they are no longer superconductors. It is possible that a room temperature superconductor could be created that has a limit too low to be of any practical use. It seems this is worth cautious excitement, but don't get too excited yet.
- skunkworker 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k This is an unlisted video of the LK-99 film (purportedly)
- cududa 3y agoI need someone to burst my bubble, this is too exciting
- stronglikedan 3y agoI can't deboonk it from what I can see. It would be interesting if it zoomed out to show the environment this was occurring in.
- marcosdumay 3y agoExpect the first iterations of that material to not actually hold currents well in a long (macroscopic) distance and create much weaker magnets than one would expect from a random superconductor. But it's also a surprise for theoreticians, and I guess the mechanism is very prone to improvement.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lilgreenland 3y agoIsn't this how copper already works without superconductivity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA
- sudosysgen 3y agoOnly temporarily. After a fraction of a second the dampening isn't strong enough anymore to prevent the two from entering into contact.
- lilgreenland 3y ago
- carabiner 3y ago[flagged]
- jeepers6 3y ago[flagged]
- jacquesm 3y agoIf true this will be worth a Nobel.
- XorNot 3y agoUh.. What? This is a Nobel prize if true. This is literally a world changing, history defining moment if true. Like "renewable energy storage solved" scale of revolutionary. So I'm very skeptical right now.
- kensai 3y agoIt reminds me the properties of "Floatstone" in Civilization: Beyond Earth! :)
- swarfield 3y agohttps://imgflip.com/i/7tq0s3 https://imgflip.com/i/7tq0s3
- whimsicalism 3y agoUnless they are blatantly faking data, the released evidence looks very convincing. I am curious the degree to which this actually validates the theory they are discussing in their paper versus is some property they stumbled upon and have some retroactive justification for.
- arnaudsm 3y agoExciting paper. I hope this won't be the same scenario as the other team that claimed a room-temperature superconductor in 2020 and was later proven to be a fraud. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2
- lucubratory 3y agoThe other team had a very complex to evaluate claim about the specific data indicating superconductivity, and the methodology required a lot of pressure and was quite difficult to replicate (and ultimately, of course, impossible, as the results were false). The claims in this case are very simple to understand and very consistent with superconductivity, demonstrated on a macro scale at normal pressures and temperatures, there's video of the phenomena that doesn't make sense absent superconductivity, and most importantly: the method to produce the material is very simple, it is not going to be difficult at all for labs around the world to replicate this, and as other commenters have pointed out a lot of YouTubers are going to be able to replicate this. So basically, this result could be fake, but it would need to be entirely faked results, faked video footage/photos, and it would be discovered very, very quickly because this is so easy to replicate. If it's true, people will have replicated this within a couple of weeks, which would be mostly sourcing materials. It will take longer than that for replications to publish (probably shorter for YouTubers), but this isn't going to be a situation where two years later we find out it's a fraud - we will know within a maximum of a couple of months that YouTubers can or can't replicate these results, and within a year whether a lab can or can't.
- floxy 3y ago>If it's true, people will have replicated this within a couple of weeks, which would be mostly sourcing materials. I wonder how much it would cost to try and replicate this, in materials, labor costs, and vacuum furnace time/costs. My naive guess is that that labs in general aren't just going to drop everything to try an replicate every instance of someone declaring they've discovered room temperature superconductivity. Seems more like a "there's a lull in paying work, so hey, why don't some of you junior technicians try this out" thing? Anyone have insight into this? I suppose a university lab might have more leeway here to try out spur of the moment experiments? Maybe this is a "I'm personally interested in this and I'll work in the evenings to test it out, instead of on company/university time"?
- r00fus 3y agoObligatory Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri [1] quote: "Important? Yes! Critical? Absolutely. I would go so far as to say that Superconducting Fiber alone makes our present economy possible." Just imaging what the changes in our world would be if even half of what's possible comes true. [1] https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/Superconductor https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/Superconductor
- rich_sasha 3y agoSuper cool! What's the queue of things we'd like to do with a room temperature superconductor, and how might they affect my life? [I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious]
- blobbb 3y agothe patent application is here https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO2023027536A1 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO202...
- COGlory 3y agoYeah, nobody get too excited. We still have to wait 20 years for the patent to expire.
- mark_feelthree 3y agoHuh? The patent system isn't for people to block anyone from using an invention for 20 years... It's to protect the inventors while they license the technology. If this works they'll be licensing the rights to use it to some massive companys... besides multiple Korean companies are already invested in it... LK-99 would likely only be a first step... a brittle crystal doesn't make a great power line...
- blobbb 3y agothe patent application on LK-99 is here https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO2023027536A1 https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO202...
- blobbb 3y agofiled 2022-08-25
- lopuhin 3y agoI think it's even from 2021-08-25, see https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20230030188A/en?oq=WO2023027536A1 https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20230030188A/en?oq=WO202...
- downvotetruth 3y ago2 years after the patent application and 4 months since publication and not involving any lab an author is not apart of to replicate a process that should take a week - a reason to wait for seems hard to justify.
- overboard2 3y agoThese look like very general patents
- foota 3y agoMaybe it's some kind of game where they pre file things and then fill in the details but get a better date? I was concerned when I saw this as well though
- inasio 3y ago- Please check out my paper, we just found a new superconductor, it has a critical temperature of 127 degrees. - Look, I'm a bit busy right now - Celsius
- refulgentis 3y agoI don't understand, I assume it's a dialogue? What is the meaning of the punchline being Celsius? Does the first sentence intend to include "room-temperature"?
- malnourish 3y agoThe punchline is the temperature was originally presumed to be Kelvin.
- syncsynchalt 3y agoThough a _real_ stickler of a scientist knows that K is not given in degrees and would have lightly chastised if making that assumption. I still enjoyed the joke though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vermarish 3y agoThe joke is, the second person heard 127 degrees, assumed that was Kelvin, and dismissed it as unimpressive. Then they realized it was 127 degrees Celsius, which is MUCH more impressive.
- mchusma 3y agoI re-read 127 celsius multiple times to try and make sure I understood that (260 Fahrenheit). This is a nice extra bonus, not only does this work at "room temperature", it works in death valley. At 127 celsius, you have a lot of margin even over the hottest temperatures on earth (which appear to be mostly recognized as 56.7 °C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o....
- meindnoch 3y agoAh, I see, they decided to start leaking some of the alien stuff they recovered from UFO crash sites in the 50s.
- weard_beard 3y agoOnly the bits that fix climate change (better batteries, lossless transmission)
- meindnoch 3y agoYeah. The Greys gave permission to fix the planet, but anti-gravity won't be released until humanity becomes peaceful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alliao 3y agothis invoked a dusty memory of the back to the future II movie; the hover board was a Barbie branded one
- peter_d_sherman 3y agoMy takeaway: >"In 2008, Gozar et al. reported hightemperature interface superconductivity between metallic and insulating copper oxides(39). The thinner the layer, the greater the stress-inducing effect, the greater the strain, which seems to be the higher the superconducting transition temperature. Therefore, we argue that the stress caused by temperature and pressure brings a minute structural distortion and strain, which create an electronic state for superconductivity." Anyway, very interesting paper!
- varjag 3y agoThe first this month.
- RyanAdamas 3y agoHoly crap.
- aden1ne 3y agoWow, if true this would be absolutely huge!
- andreiklochko 3y agoGuys, even if everything in this paper is true, the material as it is might have limited applications. From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA). This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution". Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool!
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the material as it is might have limited applications Is LK-99 part of a larger (either known or emerging) class of materials? I'm not understanding what the lead and copper ions are doing to create internal stress, and why that leads to superconductivity.
- jacquesm 3y agoJust like in previous super conductor findings once a material is made and understood that usually paves the way to new discoveries, sometimes those are (big) improvements on the status quo. I'd expect this finding - assuming it is true and verified - to result in massive funding towards the material science labs to try to improve on it. So I'd say this is example '1' of a new class of materials and if it holds up then probably we will find more members of that class once the mechanisms are understood.
- deckar01 3y agoPb(2)-phosphate is a crystalline compound. They are creating a 2D film of it using vapor deposition, then doping it with copper ions. This is a standard process in semiconductor manufacturing. There are room temperature ambient pressure materials doped to create quantum wells in production right now. They are not super conductors, because the quantum wells are merely impurities that reduce the resistance of the material. I believe this paper is claiming a crystal so saturated with quantum wells that it conducts primarily through quantum wells with almost no resistance (and that all of the other physical properties of a superconductor arise from this).
- DarmokJalad1701 3y agoI really hope we see some verification (the opposite) in the coming weeks/days. This is huge!
- thevania 3y agoseems it already went thru some peer review here: http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=ART002955269 http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=A...
- Roark66 3y agoI very much wish it to be true, but until it is at least published in a peer reviewed journal I'm not holding my breath.
- javajosh 3y agoEveryone is so excited, and it is exciting, but I guess I don't see how this will "change the world". It doesn't seem applicable for transmission lines (it's brittle and cannot conduct large amounts of current), which is what I would imagine would be the biggest world changing thing. Maybe it could make maglev trains a more common reality? But we seem to have trouble building trains of any sort. If you could use the material for PCB traces you could eliminate (a lot?) of heat loss from computing equipment. But you're still stuck with Si on the chip itself. You're still stuck with high voltage copper power lines. What, exactly, are the "world changing" applications? Perhaps my imagination isn't up to the task of seeing this. What I see is a novelty for physics students to levitate magnets without the need for liquid nitrogen, and perhaps it will make some quantum computing designs more efficient (and therefore render PKI obsolete. yay?)
- Mizza 3y agoI don't see why these transistors are going to be so much better than tubes. Okay, so you can make a smaller radio? People don't move their radios around all that much anyway. We don't know what we will know in the future, or else we would already know it.
- javajosh 3y agoAh, I see. You are excited that this will change the world, but you don't know how, and you're willing to label someone who asking about specifics as a backwards luddite. You wouldn't happen to be in crypto currency would you?
- Meegul 3y agoI think the excitement around this is partially people overestimating the properties of this particular material, but also partially people excited that if this is true, the method by which it works might result in the discovery of materials with even better properties. Even this paper doesn't claim to have a particularly good superconductor as far as overall performance is concerned. It's not particularly close to the state of the art in critical field or current. But if it does turn out that their hypothesis claiming that the internal stress of the material allows it to bypass the current need for extremely high pressures / low temperatures, then perhaps there can be new materials developed that are better superconductors while still overcoming the current limitations presented by REBCOs and other leading superconductors. Also, that's not even mentioning that LK-99 has no particularly exotic materials. REBCOs rely on rare earth elements like Yttrium, but this just uses lead, copper, and phosphorus.
- tantony 3y agoBased on the paper, results, video etc., this is either legit, or a massive fraud. I guess we will know soon enough. If it is real though, this is a massive step up for humanity. The stuff of science fiction.
- ugh123 3y agoOr misread calculations?
- hatsunearu 3y agoI don't have any proof of this other than "vibes", but I read through the Korean website for their research lab and I'm getting major scam vibes: https://qcentre.co.kr/ https://qcentre.co.kr/ Hard to put it into words, but there's something that just doesn't feel right--I'd be very skeptical of these results.
- valine 3y agoIt would be a really dumb scam. The paper is allegedly easy to reproduce. It’ll be proven or disproven in short order, where’s the motive?
- hatsunearu 3y agoNo idea, but there's a lot of high profile scams where it seemed really fucking dumb just like this one. Like the Schon scandal comes to mind. Super easily non-reproducible but somehow the dude was adamant that it was legit and everyone ate it up.
- floxy 3y agoImagine that someone is about to run out of funding. They spin up an semi-plausible story that they have just discovered something great. But "the man"/big oil/pharma/Illuminati is suppressing you and the truth. It might allow them to save face with certain people in their social circle (at the same time burning their bridges in the larger world). And/or your creditors might think you have gone crazy and not try to collect on their debts. And/or they might be in the midst of a manic phase of their bipolar disorder.
- DarmokJalad1701 3y agoThe website does not inspire confidence. I guess we wait for other attempts at reproducing this.
- PBnFlash 3y agoYeah, that and the videos people are posting are really underwhelming.
- jiggawatts 3y agoKeep in mind that superconductors are not just useful for powerful electromagnets! They're also excellent for all sorts of other functions such as EM shielding, antennas, etc... High temperature superconductors are not likely to be useful as powerful magnets, but they can be useful for almost everything else.
- pfdietz 3y agoThis is either enormous or nothing. It will be very interesting to see it play out.
- EuropeOverlords 3y ago[dead]
- pookah 3y ago[dead]
- arjvik 3y agoRelevant XKCD, from not even a month ago: https://xkcd.com/2798/ https://xkcd.com/2798/
- achr2 3y agoThis is almost certainly a sham. I had hopes before watching the videos, but the only effects shown are normal paramagnetism (from the copper substrate) and diamagnetism (pyrolytic graphite).
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoSo hoverboard?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- waldothedog 3y agoI generally understand that superconductivity under normal human conditions is desirable, but could someone summarize what this material might be used for near-term, and what this might lead to? If this is comparable to the development of the transistor, what are the analogous vacuum tubes that I am living with today?
- lucubratory 3y agoIf it works as advertised, it would make a fantastic toy. Various different types of levitating toys would now be possible that would have previously required liquid nitrogen on hand. A lot of CEOs are probably going to have very pretty and novel floating desk ornaments. Not really a great toy for children or general consumption due to the lead content, though. For all of the big use cases people mostly talk about when referring to room temperature superconductivity, like very cheap and easy MRIs, lower losses in power grid transmission, more powerful motors, cheaper and easier nuclear fusion (potentially necessary for commercial viability), this material as-is won't be suitable because it can't deal with that much current. We would need to explore this new family of materials and try to find one that maintains the superconductivity but significantly increases critical current and critical Tesla. That said, this material could be genuinely revolutionary for consumer electronics and computation. Increasing computational energy efficiency on the chip level is going to be really valuable, but it's also probably going to take a long time to make it into actual electronics. Although, it is encouraging that the process for making this is similar to processes that are already used widely in industry, even in semiconductors specifically.
- waldothedog 3y agoThank you!
- viewtransform 3y agoAnother room temp superconductor claim retraction: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2
- cududa 3y agoHe has a history of lying. References to his fraud are all over this thread. What is the relation are you suggesting?
- viewtransform 3y agoNo relation suggested.
- achr2 3y agoWe need @bkraz to fire up the Applied Science lab.
- fnord77 3y agohow does a room temperature superconductor not violate one of the laws of thermodynamics?
- Koiwai 3y agolet me simplify that for you: how does a superconductor not violate one of the laws of thermodynamics?
- winrid 3y agoThis would absolutely change the world if they can make it transfer any meaningful current. I'm in awe. Just keep the Pierson's Puppeteers away. :)
- eBombzor 3y agoAnyone smarter than me know how this differs from this sham a few years ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777268 Also, I see a lot of people claiming superconductors could become household items. What are super conductors even made of? Are these materials accessible to normal people?
- sheepscreek 3y agoBecause this one's easy to reproduce. With some practice, anyone and their mom can try this at home. It's only a matter of time before some Youtuber tries to validate this.
- saberdancer 3y agoLK-99 is claimed to be room temperature and pressure.
- classicmotto 3y agoBing chat said - - Step 1: Prepare lanarkite, Pb2SO5, by mixing PbO and PbSO4 powders in a 1:1 molar ratio in an agate mortar with a pestle. Transfer the mixture to an alumina crucible and react it at 725 °C for 24 hours in a furnace. Pulverize the white product with the mortar. - Step 2: Prepare copper phosphide, Cu3P, by mixing Cu and P powders in a 3:1 molar ratio. Transfer the mixture to a quartz tube and seal it under a vacuum of 10-5 Torr. React it at 550 °C for 48 hours in a furnace. Take out the dark gray ingot and pulverize it. - Step 3: Mix lanarkite and copper phosphide powders in a 1:1 molar ratio in an agate mortar with a pestle. Transfer the mixture to a reaction tube and seal it under a vacuum of 10-5 Torr. React it at 925 °C for 10 hours in a furnace. Take out the dark gray ingot and shape it into thin cuboids for electrical measurements. Pulverize some of the ingot for other analyses. These are the steps to synthesize the LK-99 material.
- i_like_apis 3y agoAnyone able to infer what volume or mass of this substance they're claiming to have produced? How many unit cells?
- umrashrf 3y agoWhat’s the material used for superconductivity in the paper?
- carabiner 3y agoRead this comment thread from SC researchers: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/comment/jtgmiph/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/comment/... Lots of problems with the paper, they claim. It is not up to the standards of current SC research. One of them says Dias's work shows more merit than this.
- Koiwai 3y agoAll valid points but just below that comment someone asked if he/she was reading the new paper (apparently there's an older paper), he/she didn't respond/haven't responded yet.
- yreg 3y agoThey did now – https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/roomtemperature_superconductor_discovered/jti0g28/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/roomtemp... Either way we should hear from people trying to replicate it soon.
- Koiwai 3y agoThanks for the update, after reading that, and the fact the patent was dated 2021, my faith is lost.
- qnleigh 3y agoHis criticism of figure 1b doesn't seem reasonable to me, given that the are resistance measurements in 1a and 1c that show zero resistance coming and going in roughly the expected way as a function of temperature and magnetic field. Unlikely that the connections would break and reconnect in just the right way. Nevertheless I'm still quite skeptical.
- 015a 3y ago> we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) I'll say, for "room temperature", that's certainly no room I'd want to be in.
- carabiner 3y agoNo, the video shows them manipulating the superconductor with their hands in thin gloves.
- thevinter 3y agoTc is the critical temperature, not the temperature at which it conducts best
- tkanarsky 3y agothat's the max temp beyond which it loses superconductivity, not a requirement. The paper has a graph of max current vs temp, and it gets vastly better at actual room temp of ~300k
- jacknews 3y agoGood news if true, but are there any comprehensive accounts of what actual benefits/applications ambient superconductors would have? It seems to me the hype is along the lines of 'free electricity', 'levitating trains', 'magnetic space launches', 'climate change solved', etc, etc, but these seem either wrong or unrealistic to me. Electricity transmission efficiency can improve a little, for some routes. Same for electric motors, but they're already 95%+ efficient in some cases. Maybe it would be useful for energy storage, maybe not - depends on capabilities and especially cost. Might be useful for levitating trains if suitable, but even then this would be a relatively minor part of any overall design. I can see a lot of applications/possibilities in research, and in sensors, and maybe it enables some things that aren't currently possible, but what?. It's undeniably neat and interesting, but it seems over-hyped; maybe someone can enlighten me? Is there a 'killer app'?
- mark_feelthree 3y agoIdeally you build an international power grid. Solar in the Sahara powers Europe but then you loop it around the world and we have 24 hour power from Australia and the Atacama, tied into hydro, nuclear and wind. Put it in your battery anode and you can charge your car in a few seconds. Computers won't need cooling and can be way smaller. Quantum computing becomes more practical. AGI is more likely. Huge implications for Fusion, which then means we can start pulling CO2 from the air since we'll have more power than we need... 'good news' doesn't begin to cover it :)
- hatsunearu 3y agoYeah, this is a grift. https://www.wowtv.co.kr/NewsCenter/News/Read?articleId=A201512290668 https://www.wowtv.co.kr/NewsCenter/News/Read?articleId=A2015... Don't want to translate because it's a waste of time but they are using some crazy buzzwords to raise money for their unlisted stock. Gems like how they extracted some miracle material from plant matter that exhibits "Quantum Energy Living Body" and it apparently has self-healing properties and emits UVA rays (I cannot translate how ludicrous this is, this is some biosteel cyberpunk 2077 shit)
- Jweb_Guru 3y agoNot the same company, Quantum Energy Co vs Quantum Energy Research Center. Your article is from 2015 and features someone who is not involved in any of the papers or with the company.
- hatsunearu 3y agoyou're right.
- bhaskara2 3y agoBig if true!
- abledoc 3y agoDespite all the challenges ahead 400K (critical temperature) is mind boggling.
- abledoc 3y agoDespite technological challenges ahead, 400K as critical temperatute is Hot! We are into Hot Temperature superconductivity regime, not room tempearature.
- printerdev 3y agoNo one refers to Robust superconductivity in magic-angle multilayer graphene family - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01287-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01287-1 How is this better than this?
- lysecret 3y agoExcited for all the YouTube videos about this.
- DanielHB 3y agoThe last sentence in the paper: > We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.
- Sir_Salty 3y agoIf you are curious what the betting markets think, Manifold Markets is hovering around 30% with 225 traders that it is replicated before 2025. https://manifold.markets/Mira/will-the-first-roomtemperature-ambi?r=RGF2aWRDaGVl https://manifold.markets/Mira/will-the-first-roomtemperature... There's a few more similar questions on their news dashboard: https://manifold.markets/home?tab=superconductor%3F https://manifold.markets/home?tab=superconductor%3F
- adrianmonk 3y agoI think you meant to link here: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-... The one you linked is about retraction, not replication. Interestingly, they're both near 25%, which seems kinda contradictory. The retraction one has a deadline of Jan 1, 2024, but the replication one is Jan 1, 2025. There's also this other retraction one with a later deadline of Jan 1, 2025: https://manifold.markets/jack/will-the-first-roomtemperature-ambi-61c98e502e09 https://manifold.markets/jack/will-the-first-roomtemperature... So the market leans toward the idea that it won't be replicated, and it will be retracted in 2024 (or in 2023 but less likely).
- dkqmduems 3y agoI hope that this result can be independently reproduced. The theory behind superconductivity in this material is nearly absent. I find this odd.
- amai 3y agoSee also - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor#Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto... Given there have been already around 10-20 claims of room-temperature superconductivity in the past which turned out to be wrong or useless, bayesian reason would imply that this has a maximum of 10% probability that it is true.
- andromaton 3y agoMental note: "If true then" comments skip "true?" part yet add to the momentum of this story. The ratio tells me not true. We'll see how this ages.
- andromaton 3y agoIt seems to be aging well, since prediction markets are in the 20% range and parent comment is getting down voted/s
- nektro 3y agoabsolutely huge if true
- hgrbrm 3y agoOn page 4 they list two equivalent criteria for superconductivity: "the electric field criterion with 1 μV/cm or 0.1 μV/cm and resistivity criterion with 10^-11 Ω·cm." On the same page they write: "In various bulk samples, specific resistance was measured in the range of 10^-6 to 10^-9 Ω·cm." That does not meet the resistivity criterion, not even close. In the second paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037 ) on page 8 they write: "In the first region below red-arrow C (near 60°C), equivalent to region F in the inset of Fig. 5, the resistivity with noise signals can be regarded as zero." I can only see from the plotted curve that the resistivity below 60°C is below about 5·10^-4 Ω·cm. Compare that to the resistivity of silver, which is 1.59·10^-6 Ω·cm. It doesn't get better if you test the electric field criterion. On page 11 of the second paper you can see in Fig 6a that they measured a voltage of about 2mV in the "superconducting" state, and the voltage only drops off when the current approaches 0. In the first paper on page 19 they write that they used pogo probes with a distance of 1.2mm. So the electric field they measured is about 17mV/cm. That is a lot higher than the superconductor criterion of 1µV/cm, let alone 0.1µV/cm. Even if they mistakenly used mV instead of µV in their diagram, a factor of 17 would still need a good explanation. So either a complete fake or an interesting effect but not superconductivity.
- KETpXDDzR 3y agoFigures 1(a) and (c) are implausible. Usually something like this looks like this [0]. Note the gradual increase at low currents, this effect is to be expected especially with magnetic fields. Fig. 1(d) cannot be correct either. At Tc ~ 400K the Meissner effect would displace a much stronger field than 10 Oe = 1 mT. I.e. the distinction between FC (field cooled) and ZFC (zero-field cooled) should not be that pronounced. It should look more like this [1]. What the authors might mean is that they are outside the Meissner range, which can occur at higher magnetic fields (keyword: Type II superconductors). It will look like that [2]. In this case, however, the temperature dependency does not agree at all with the critical currents of Figs. 1(a) and (c). Also, that ALL the values in Fig. 1(d) are negative is extremely unusual, but that could perhaps be argued with. The data set in Fig. 4(b) is also a treat. It is VERY unusual when the heat capacity decreases again at high temperatures. This can happen at low temperatures, but not at high temperatures. I am very familiar with the described experimental setup / the cryostat. There is no good reason why the authors did not measure at higher temperatures to show that the behavior is markedly different above Tc ~ 400K. For example, a temperature dependency of the resistance would have been absolutely necessary. In general, the paper is very poorly written. The data is under-discussed, the explanations are sparse, and the work cited is, shall we say, sparse. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what the authors measured and claim to have seen. My personal assumption is that the authors measured an insulator, so no current flowed and therefore no voltage occurred (4-point measurement). Then it looks like a superconductor. But if you then turn up the current (i.e. the applied voltage), breakdowns may occur and a current begins to flow. That would explain the sharp increase. Src: Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research [0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthias-Graf-4/publication/233871395/figure/fig5/AS:668845236826120@1536476539728/color-online-a-IV-curves-at-several-representative-magnetic-fields-Three-different.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthias-Graf-4/publica... [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370037045/figure/fig1/AS:11431281152878176@1682210458059/Meissner-effect-in-TiZr-at-three-different-applied-fields-Note-that-in-SI-units-a.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370037045/figure/fi... [2]https://www.europhysicsnews.org/images/stories/hl/472/Guo.jpg https://www.europhysicsnews.org/images/stories/hl/472/Guo.jp...
- euroderf 3y agoDoes a superconductor need to be ductile (when being fabricated) to be real-world useful ?