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Why is it hard to make in bulk? I thought the chemicals were easy and cheap to obtain, and then you bake it at a high temp? What makes it difficult?
by VierScar 3y ago
Why is it hard to make in bulk? I thought the chemicals were easy and cheap to obtain, and then you bake it at a high temp?
What makes it difficult?
- aqme28 3y agoI don’t have really any expertise here but it looks like it bakes into a powder pretty much every time. Sure you get LK-99, but you can’t measure superconductivity in a powder since it’s a bulk property.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beowulfey 3y agoThe variables that lead to its formation are not all accounted for yet. The process is understood, but it doesn’t always work. So there must be something missing every now and then.
- aydyn 3y agoSo they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it? That would be a wild story if true.
- weard_beard 3y agoThe theory is the crystal structure induced by oxidation and vibration is responsible for the superconducting effect. They literally dropped and cracked the quartz ampoule by accident and produced the sample. Its not enough to produce the material itself, it seems it is an emergent property of the structure and formation of the material similar to piezoelectric effect?
- galangalalgol 3y agoNot that crazy. Steel was the same at first. Wild guess is that the dopant that creates wells doesn't always end up where it should. The paper that claimed superconductivity in layers of graphene at very particular angles also seems to be very sensitive. A similar one claimed graphene with alkanes was observed to superconduct. Perhapes whatever impure hydrocarbon they were using held the sheets at the perfect angle. All the quantum wells these things are claiming to rely on seem terribly difficult to arrange perfectly enough to work consistently. Assuming any of them ever did.
- tialaramex 3y agoNo indeed. Lots of this in our history. You can't do most of electronics without semiconductors. But, if you have no idea what's going on you can make some rudimentary electronics experiments work - unreliably - without knowing that - e.g. the "Cat's whisker" crystal radio technology. The reason this actually works is because it's a semiconductor, but since you don't know what those are yet, you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal, sometimes it does what you wanted, and if it doesn't keep fiddling with it until it does. I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same. Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so you can engineer getting exactly the desired products from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring or keeping careful control of temperature, you get... something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball" it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but with better equipment an idiot with no experience can make it do what they wanted because the numbers were correct.
- jacquesm 3y ago> you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal, Even an old rusty razor blade will work as a diode if you try hard and long enough.
- WalterBright 3y agoSamurai sword making took what, a thousand years of trial and error? The forgers had no idea how making steel worked, they just found a way to make it work.
- flamedoge 3y agoMore interesting that they found a way to work with poor quality iron
- fbdab103 3y agoI have repeatedly read that Japan has poor quality iron, but what exactly does that mean? Iron is an element, so all of the reserves were in an unfortunate oxide requiring sophisticated refining? Just low total abundance?
- Accujack 3y ago>So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it? No, we don't know how to reproduce it, with "we" being everyone not on the South Korean team. The papers everyone is trying to work from to replicate this are the "leaked" arXiv papers. That actual peer reviewed paper is still in process, and presumably that one includes more information on how to replicate the material.
- kraussvonespy 3y agoCould the material need to be "seeded" by the proper polymorph? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs
- tomatotomato37 3y agoGiven the sheer amount of samples material scientists may produce I imagine accidentally hitting your target characteristic through impurities rather than direct formula may happen more often then they care to admit. That being said even if they haven't actually narrowed down on the exact formula knowing it can even happen in the first place is a major discovery
- maxerickson 3y agoIf it was well understood what made it difficult, odds are it would be improving fast.
- drbaba 3y agoNote that “bulk” in this context means a single large chunk, not a large quanitity.
- weard_beard 3y agoThe first time it demonstrated superconductivity they dropped the quartz tube it was in, cracking and accidentally oxidizing it at a specific point in the heating process and providing vibration that caused the formation of a crystal structure in the material. That's... not easily replicable.
- xxpor 3y agoI hope this doesn't end up like a physics equivalent to Fermat's Last Theorem
- bluGill 3y agoThat would be better than the physics equivalent of cold fusion (which seemed promising at first, but turns out to not exist - at least so far). Only time will tell, though if it really is, but so difficult to replicate that we need a few hundred years it may as well never exist for purposes of our lifetime.
- TillE 3y agoAssuming that replications fail but they really do have samples of a superconductor that can be thoroughly examined, this is still fantastic. Once we know the exact structure, the problem of synthesis is very solvable.
- Enginerrrd 3y agoI can't help but feel that is an awfully convenient story..
- jacquesm 3y agoThere are wilder ones. Penicillin, the pacemaker and the microwave for instance.
- carabiner 3y agoThere's a chemist who gave a breakdown with what's known so far: https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/1684615867726798854 https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/16846158677267988... It's not clear exactly what compound constitutes "LK-99" because the equations in the papers are unbalanced and the synthesis is ill defined. What they say they got doesn't make sense for how they say they got it. Most likely it's a mixture of compounds, any of which could be producing the alleged superconducting phenomena.