4 ms·
big 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 re
by foxhill 3y ago
big 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.
- ridgeguy 3y agoI've looked briefly at the materials synthesis (first part of their Supplementary Materials section). I agree with you, the synthesis is trivial. The 10e-5 vacuum is easily reached with a turbopump backed by a mechanical pump, nothing exotic or expensive.
- foxhill 3y agoindeed, and i wonder if you could elide the vacuum entirely with a noble gas (presuming the vacuum is required to avoid reactions with atmospheric gases)
- ridgeguy 3y agoCould be, and good idea. If they're processing in a vacuum to avoid N2 and/or O2 and/or H2O chemistry, then a dry inert gas might be useful. Heating above 100°C to drive off H2O, followed by a purge with dry Ar might give the desired result without needing a vacuum system.
- Brusco_RF 3y agoPlease go ahead and make it at home. Like many others, I want this to be true badly but my BS detectors are blaring
- JoeMattie 3y agoI've made YBCO superconductors in my garage many times and the solid state synthesis method in the paper is very similar to that used by hobbyists. In fact, it seems to not require the usual careful slow annealing under flowing oxygen. I wouldn't be at all surprised if even simpler methods are feasible. For instance, there's a rapid synthesis method for YBCO that uses a small alumina boat, some glass wool, a residential 800w microwave oven, and slightly modified mixture of precursors to allow free oxygen to be liberated in the mixture during heating and trapped in the wool around the sample so you don't need to rig an oxygen concentrator up. IIRC it only takes about 15 minutes to prepare a sample. This is extremely exciting! I've read hundreds of papers on superconductor manufacture and testing over the years and this has all the hallmarks of legitimacy, at least from my citizen-mad-scientist perspective.
- Mizza 3y agoSounds like you've got a very interesting weekend project coming up!
- Maxion 3y agoThe synthesis section honestly looks very simple, I would assume a simple ceramic kiln could be used? You just need PbO, PbSO4, Cu, and P powders.
- foxhill 3y agokiln materials are listed, too not that i think it matters that much. the paper doesn’t indicate that synthesis is a particularly sensitive step.
- aden1ne 3y agoThe powdered lead seems like something you need to be careful with tho. Quite toxic.
- civilitty 3y agoNo more or less toxic than the powders used to hand mix oil paints. Just buy a fume hood off ebay.
- MisterTea 3y ago> if you consider 10e-5 torr vacuum to be trivial Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 10E-6/10E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings.
- MisterTea 3y ago> if you consider 10e-5 torr vacuum to be trivial Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 1E-6/1E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings. My little e-gun experiments are all done with a Alcatel Pascal 2008 and I can achieve ~3E-3 with just that pump. I'm building a bigger system with a VHS4 diffusion pump w/cold trap that should get me into -6 territory easily.
- jacquesm 3y agoWhat on earth are you up to? :)
- MisterTea 3y agoNothing crazy ;-) Actually I'm just playing with plasma electron sources for heating/welding/melting.
- jacquesm 3y agoNeat. I had a Thermal Dynamics 12 KW plasmacutter and a rig to control it across three axis. Best tool I ever owned bar none. From thinking about something to having it in your hand in a couple of minutes in steel up to 1" thick. Amazing toy. I figured out that by moving it faster than it can cut you can 'score' steel and if you use that creatively you can make fold-at-the-lines steel structures that you then weld up on the edges. You can make super complex stuff like that in no time at all and you usually don't need any jigs other than a few magnets to line things up prior to tack welding.