13 ms·

The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing

The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today. - Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap. Can I have my flying car now?

klysm 3y ago
> Batteries that don't take any time to recharge Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
- idontpost 3y ago
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- derefr 3y ago
  Resistance is what makes things hot, and heat is what makes dumping huge amounts of charge current into batteries a bad idea. No resistance → no heat → no need to charge with low current†. Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car. † (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
  - postmodest 3y ago
    Wouldn't the battery itself still have resistance? Or is the superconducting material itself a battery?
    - derefr 3y ago
      Depends. A single battery cell would have nontrivial resistance, yes. But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current. And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
      - highwaylights 3y ago
        Additionally you need to have the current to deliver in the first place. Having a grid that can dump 25-100 kwh into any given car in a couple of minutes is no small task if everyone is doing it.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        The utilization factor would obviously be much lower than it would be if everybody charges at a lower rate so if the total amount of energy is equal that just means that individual vehicles will spend less time charging, and the grid will see - roughly - identical utilization on average but the peaks may be higher.
        burnished 3y ago
        Probably worth pointing out that the peaks and troughs are what are challenging to deal with. Generators aren't generally great at changing output super fast. I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
      - fsh 3y ago
        The current is limited by what the battery chemistry can take, not by the cables. This is why the first 80% can be charged quite fast in modern EVs, and the last 20% are really slow.
  - armarr 3y ago
    Sure, it would make the wiring smaller and more efficient. But I also don't see how it would help in the chemical energy transfer to charge the battery.
    - derefr 3y ago
      What I was trying to say is, with some battery chemistries, the current (heh) limiting step for charging speed is the wiring into, and of, the battery, rather than the safe reaction speed of the battery chemistry itself. We could safely "crank the chemistry" by an order-of-magnitude or more if we could get the desired current into the battery without the wires+electrodes conducting undue amounts of heat into the electrolyte.
      - tigershark 3y ago
        No, it’s not. It’s the chemical reaction the limit. In li-ion for example you will create dendrites when charging/discharging too fast or too deep. This is the cause of the relatively short cycle life.
      - danudey 3y ago
        According to the paper, this material stops superconducting at about 150mA per cm^2 of diameter, meaning that a 1cm-thick cable made of this material could conduct up to 150mA before the current is too much and it stops superconducting. If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least). Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes. Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
  - Chabsff 3y ago
    Superconductors also have an inherent current limit above which they go back to having a resistance.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    I’m not an expert on this, but I think superconducting wires have an current limit, as a current flowing creates a magnetic field which the superconductor has to repel. I read that the paper states a very low current limit for LK-99, meaning it loses superconductivity once a very modest amount of current is passed through it.
    - Melatonic 3y ago
      That is.....kind of a huge limitation of the technology lol. Still very cool but less hype
      - thorncorona 3y ago
        I believe the implication is that LK-99 is basically a demonstration of an entire class of materials which should have room-temp superconduction properties. IE we can enumerate through the entire class and find the ones with the properties we want.
        PBnFlash 3y ago
        There is no reason to assume that even if it's real. In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
        thorncorona 3y ago
        At least according to this wikipedia chart on superconductor discovery timelines[1], it seems like most discoveries aren't one-off. I have no knowledge in this area though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/media/File:Sc_history.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
      - azernik 3y ago
        A limitation...at ambient temperature and pressure. Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor. If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > you can make the wire as thin as you want No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      I assume this would rule out things like fusion reactors, MRIs, and other high energy stuff. Would it still be revolutionary tech with a 150 mA limit?
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Yes, it would be upending just about everything because the race would be on to improve on that. Think of it this way: once you show that something is possible at all there will be substantial funding available to improve on it. As long as you can't show that it is possible at all you're on your own. So if it works and that 150 mA is the limit then you can expect a ton of effort to be expended to improve on that and I fully expect those improvements not to take decades to show up. The more interesting question is if it really is that low of a limit what the reason is for that and I don't recall seeing any explanation so far. On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
        XorNot 3y ago
        The current hypothesis is that most likely whatever they made is not a pure sample of the material which actually superconducts - this is expected, since when you make YBCO superconductors you also tend to get low yields (i.e. ~20%) that actually superconduct. So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    There are many things that seem like electrical resistance but are different phenomena. Capacitive reactance, inductance, "radiation resistance", etc. Superconductors don't prevent any of these effects. But, these effects are usually smaller than ordinary resistance.
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  - cogman10 3y ago
    Heat from power transfer is not the problem with current battery tech. We are already capable of delivering 350kW worth of power into EV batteries. The limiting factor is not the power cable delivering that power. Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow. The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
- baq 3y ago
  It’s a zero resistance wire. Build a loop and pump electrons in. Need them back? Connect an off-ramp. There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
  - jychang 3y ago
    > Less than 40kJ/L
    - ChrisClark 3y ago
      Pretty sure that includes the volume of the entire cooling system needed to keep it superconducting.
      - crooked-v 3y ago
        The entire reason the current (possible) discovery may be revolutionary is that it doesn't need a cooling system.
        deleted 3y ago
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  - klysm 3y ago
    But the current density limit makes that not super effective right?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality. We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient. Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage. This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too. I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    It's interesting you are saying superconductors are hard to make because... if this one really is a superconductor it's pretty easy to make. YBCO is also not particularly hard to make either.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      The semiconductor industry is also very happy to do hard things for marginal gains. They've spent a decade swapping out semiconductor junction materials at enormous expense because there's no other option. The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
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empath-nirvana 3y ago
> Much faster with no heat to burn your lap. Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch. So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
- westurner 3y ago
  Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground) Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat. From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 : > "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h... >> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
- mikro 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
- richyliu 3y ago
  Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all. [1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on-making-it-reversible https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...
taberiand 3y ago
It might even all come fast enough to save us from climate change (But I'm not getting my hopes up)
- bananapub 3y ago
  we already know how to stop climate change: actually stop burning shit and deploy existing technologies quickly. the problem is lack of will, not lack of technology. corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    > the problem is lack of will Lack of will which fossil fuel shitbirds spend billions enfestering, with tobacco company style tactics. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing for the last fifty+ years. We probably agree on that, I'd just like to focus the blame where it properly belongs. Plenty of people care a lot about climate change, just as we care about plastic pollution and inequality, and I'm pretty fucking tired of being gaslit about it all.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    There are much more effective ways to geo-engineer earths climate. Their problem is the politics that surround all the options. Sooner or later we won't have other options.
  - gerdesj 3y ago
    Nuclear fusion would be quite handy. That's near limitless electricity from minimal input, with mostly safe failure modes and no nasty emissions. Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps. I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more licenses in the North Sea etc ...
    - Aeolun 3y ago
kleer001 3y ago
> Can I have my flying car now? I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.
- mettamage 3y ago
  I wonder if self flying cars are easier to make since every object in the air is an obstacle. This is less the true for ground transport since sometimes it may seem like an obstacle but it isn't (e.g. just a marking on the road).
  - nvader 3y ago
    Clouds are visible, but may not be an obstacle. Wind is invisible, but may be an obstacle.
- douglaswlance 3y ago
  There are far fewer things to run into in the sky.
  - kleer001 3y ago
    true. However the failure cases at those heights and velocities are far worse. There's several orders of magnitude difference between an airplane license and driving license.
zepearl 3y ago
> Can I have my flying car now? Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)
- jerf 3y ago
  Unfortunately, while you can indeed build hoverboards with superconductors and they do work, you still need a magnetic surface for it to ride over. I don't believe generalized hoverboards that will work on all surfaces like BttF are possible.
  - choeger 3y ago
    What about Earth's magnetic field?
    - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
      It's moving all the time. Next year you won't be able to skate the same locations as of today because of this :(
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    Well not with that attitude
  - MayeulC 3y ago
    Honestly, with that kind of superconductor, it may be easier and cheaper to cover the ground in superconducting material, and keep the magnets (or superconducting electromagnet) on your hoverboard!
  - croddin 3y ago
    "Hoverboards don't work on water!!"... or any non-magnetic surface :)
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nicechianti 3y ago
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fsh 3y ago
None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
- vagab0nd 3y ago
  > Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Are you thinking of supercapacitors?
    - civilitty 3y ago
      He's thinking of superconducting magnetic energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ... Currently they're only feasible as high quality power sources for fabs and other industrial uses because of the operating costs of cooling the superconductors.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Also used for grid stabilization.
        entropicdrifter 3y ago
        So superconductor supercapacitors
        heisenzombie 3y ago
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y ago
Did we read the same paper? This is a ceramic.
coldtea 3y ago
Sounds more like the perennial "10 years in the future" techs, like memsistors, cold fusion, holographic storage, and so on.
deleted 3y ago
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bardak 3y ago
Just to be a bit of a realist do we know if this material is malleable or practical to make intifrates circuits? Is it possible to make large single pieces of it? Don't get me wrong even if the awnser to all of these is no it's still probably the biggest single material science breakthrough since the transistors but we aren't necessarily going to be applicable to all the theoretical applications of semiconductors
Vicinity9635 3y ago
>The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."
- r2_pilot 3y ago
  Ha, I just posted about a dragonfly I saw while walking, and how it seemed unperturbed by the possibility of room temperature superconductors on Earth. I added that I should probably learn from the dragonfly.
  - burnished 3y ago
    Have you ever seen a dragonfly sit still? I'm just saying, I wouldn't describe them as unperturbed.
  - rtsil 3y ago
    I'd be terrified if I was the dragonfly. Its life and the lives of all other living beings depend more on what we do with our technology than on anything else.
bipop5000 3y ago
Hoverboards. I want those damn things as was prophesied by back to the future.
iancmceachern 3y ago
What things are we going to do with this material in the next 5 years? What things that I buy and use will be made better?
- burnished 3y ago
  You know those joke buzzer/shocker rings? Well, they're going to get really, really good.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Just what I've always wanted!
Riledcat 3y ago
We won’t be getting long distance high voltage electricity transmission lines made of this (possible) room temperature superconductor for the same reasons we don’t have high voltage long distance electricity transmission made of gold, a much better conductor than copper.
PaulHoule 3y ago
To kill your buzz: Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc. You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates. One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.
- robotguy 3y ago
  Reminds me of a story: I was in college physics in fall '89 and our professor was telling us how he and his son spent the summer in Alaska prospecting for whatever material was all the rage in superconductors at the time. He was explaining that when superconductors broke the liquid nitrogen temperature, it was a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid nitrogen is cheaper than beer." To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    ever bought a keg?

klysm 3y ago

> Batteries that don't take any time to recharge Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how

idontpost 3y ago
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derefr 3y ago
Resistance is what makes things hot, and heat is what makes dumping huge amounts of charge current into batteries a bad idea. No resistance → no heat → no need to charge with low current†. Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car. † (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
- postmodest 3y ago
  Wouldn't the battery itself still have resistance? Or is the superconducting material itself a battery?
  - derefr 3y ago
    Depends. A single battery cell would have nontrivial resistance, yes. But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current. And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
    - highwaylights 3y ago
      Additionally you need to have the current to deliver in the first place. Having a grid that can dump 25-100 kwh into any given car in a couple of minutes is no small task if everyone is doing it.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        The utilization factor would obviously be much lower than it would be if everybody charges at a lower rate so if the total amount of energy is equal that just means that individual vehicles will spend less time charging, and the grid will see - roughly - identical utilization on average but the peaks may be higher.
        burnished 3y ago
        Probably worth pointing out that the peaks and troughs are what are challenging to deal with. Generators aren't generally great at changing output super fast. I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
    - fsh 3y ago
      The current is limited by what the battery chemistry can take, not by the cables. This is why the first 80% can be charged quite fast in modern EVs, and the last 20% are really slow.
- armarr 3y ago
  Sure, it would make the wiring smaller and more efficient. But I also don't see how it would help in the chemical energy transfer to charge the battery.
  - derefr 3y ago
    What I was trying to say is, with some battery chemistries, the current (heh) limiting step for charging speed is the wiring into, and of, the battery, rather than the safe reaction speed of the battery chemistry itself. We could safely "crank the chemistry" by an order-of-magnitude or more if we could get the desired current into the battery without the wires+electrodes conducting undue amounts of heat into the electrolyte.
    - tigershark 3y ago
      No, it’s not. It’s the chemical reaction the limit. In li-ion for example you will create dendrites when charging/discharging too fast or too deep. This is the cause of the relatively short cycle life.
    - danudey 3y ago
      According to the paper, this material stops superconducting at about 150mA per cm^2 of diameter, meaning that a 1cm-thick cable made of this material could conduct up to 150mA before the current is too much and it stops superconducting. If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least). Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes. Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
- Chabsff 3y ago
  Superconductors also have an inherent current limit above which they go back to having a resistance.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  I’m not an expert on this, but I think superconducting wires have an current limit, as a current flowing creates a magnetic field which the superconductor has to repel. I read that the paper states a very low current limit for LK-99, meaning it loses superconductivity once a very modest amount of current is passed through it.
  - Melatonic 3y ago
    That is.....kind of a huge limitation of the technology lol. Still very cool but less hype
    - thorncorona 3y ago
      I believe the implication is that LK-99 is basically a demonstration of an entire class of materials which should have room-temp superconduction properties. IE we can enumerate through the entire class and find the ones with the properties we want.
      - PBnFlash 3y ago
        There is no reason to assume that even if it's real. In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
        thorncorona 3y ago
        At least according to this wikipedia chart on superconductor discovery timelines[1], it seems like most discoveries aren't one-off. I have no knowledge in this area though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/media/File:Sc_history.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
    - azernik 3y ago
      A limitation...at ambient temperature and pressure. Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor. If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > you can make the wire as thin as you want No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    I assume this would rule out things like fusion reactors, MRIs, and other high energy stuff. Would it still be revolutionary tech with a 150 mA limit?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Yes, it would be upending just about everything because the race would be on to improve on that. Think of it this way: once you show that something is possible at all there will be substantial funding available to improve on it. As long as you can't show that it is possible at all you're on your own. So if it works and that 150 mA is the limit then you can expect a ton of effort to be expended to improve on that and I fully expect those improvements not to take decades to show up. The more interesting question is if it really is that low of a limit what the reason is for that and I don't recall seeing any explanation so far. On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
      - XorNot 3y ago
        The current hypothesis is that most likely whatever they made is not a pure sample of the material which actually superconducts - this is expected, since when you make YBCO superconductors you also tend to get low yields (i.e. ~20%) that actually superconduct. So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
- jrockway 3y ago
  There are many things that seem like electrical resistance but are different phenomena. Capacitive reactance, inductance, "radiation resistance", etc. Superconductors don't prevent any of these effects. But, these effects are usually smaller than ordinary resistance.
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- cogman10 3y ago
  Heat from power transfer is not the problem with current battery tech. We are already capable of delivering 350kW worth of power into EV batteries. The limiting factor is not the power cable delivering that power. Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow. The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
baq 3y ago
It’s a zero resistance wire. Build a loop and pump electrons in. Need them back? Connect an off-ramp. There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
- jychang 3y ago
  > Less than 40kJ/L
  - ChrisClark 3y ago
    Pretty sure that includes the volume of the entire cooling system needed to keep it superconducting.
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      The entire reason the current (possible) discovery may be revolutionary is that it doesn't need a cooling system.
      - deleted 3y ago
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- klysm 3y ago
  But the current density limit makes that not super effective right?
marcosdumay 3y ago
Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality. We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient. Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage. This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too. I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  It's interesting you are saying superconductors are hard to make because... if this one really is a superconductor it's pretty easy to make. YBCO is also not particularly hard to make either.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    The semiconductor industry is also very happy to do hard things for marginal gains. They've spent a decade swapping out semiconductor junction materials at enormous expense because there's no other option. The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
- deleted 3y ago

empath-nirvana 3y ago

> Much faster with no heat to burn your lap. Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.

jacquesm 3y ago
This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch. So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
westurner 3y ago
Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground) Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat. From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 : > "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h... >> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
mikro 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
richyliu 3y ago
Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all. [1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on-making-it-reversible https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...

taberiand 3y ago

It might even all come fast enough to save us from climate change (But I'm not getting my hopes up)

bananapub 3y ago
we already know how to stop climate change: actually stop burning shit and deploy existing technologies quickly. the problem is lack of will, not lack of technology. corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > the problem is lack of will Lack of will which fossil fuel shitbirds spend billions enfestering, with tobacco company style tactics. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing for the last fifty+ years. We probably agree on that, I'd just like to focus the blame where it properly belongs. Plenty of people care a lot about climate change, just as we care about plastic pollution and inequality, and I'm pretty fucking tired of being gaslit about it all.
- postalrat 3y ago
  There are much more effective ways to geo-engineer earths climate. Their problem is the politics that surround all the options. Sooner or later we won't have other options.
- gerdesj 3y ago
  Nuclear fusion would be quite handy. That's near limitless electricity from minimal input, with mostly safe failure modes and no nasty emissions. Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps. I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more licenses in the North Sea etc ...
  - Aeolun 3y ago

kleer001 3y ago

> Can I have my flying car now? I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.

mettamage 3y ago
I wonder if self flying cars are easier to make since every object in the air is an obstacle. This is less the true for ground transport since sometimes it may seem like an obstacle but it isn't (e.g. just a marking on the road).
- nvader 3y ago
  Clouds are visible, but may not be an obstacle. Wind is invisible, but may be an obstacle.
douglaswlance 3y ago
There are far fewer things to run into in the sky.
- kleer001 3y ago
  true. However the failure cases at those heights and velocities are far worse. There's several orders of magnitude difference between an airplane license and driving license.

zepearl 3y ago

> Can I have my flying car now? Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)

jerf 3y ago
Unfortunately, while you can indeed build hoverboards with superconductors and they do work, you still need a magnetic surface for it to ride over. I don't believe generalized hoverboards that will work on all surfaces like BttF are possible.
- choeger 3y ago
  What about Earth's magnetic field?
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
    It's moving all the time. Next year you won't be able to skate the same locations as of today because of this :(
- highwaylights 3y ago
  Well not with that attitude
- MayeulC 3y ago
  Honestly, with that kind of superconductor, it may be easier and cheaper to cover the ground in superconducting material, and keep the magnets (or superconducting electromagnet) on your hoverboard!
- croddin 3y ago
  "Hoverboards don't work on water!!"... or any non-magnetic surface :)
  - deleted 3y ago

nicechianti 3y ago

[dead]

fsh 3y ago

None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.

vagab0nd 3y ago
> Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
- jrockway 3y ago
  Are you thinking of supercapacitors?
  - civilitty 3y ago
    He's thinking of superconducting magnetic energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ... Currently they're only feasible as high quality power sources for fabs and other industrial uses because of the operating costs of cooling the superconductors.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Also used for grid stabilization.
      - entropicdrifter 3y ago
        So superconductor supercapacitors
        heisenzombie 3y ago

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y ago

Did we read the same paper? This is a ceramic.

coldtea 3y ago

Sounds more like the perennial "10 years in the future" techs, like memsistors, cold fusion, holographic storage, and so on.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bardak 3y ago

Just to be a bit of a realist do we know if this material is malleable or practical to make intifrates circuits? Is it possible to make large single pieces of it? Don't get me wrong even if the awnser to all of these is no it's still probably the biggest single material science breakthrough since the transistors but we aren't necessarily going to be applicable to all the theoretical applications of semiconductors

Vicinity9635 3y ago

>The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."

r2_pilot 3y ago
Ha, I just posted about a dragonfly I saw while walking, and how it seemed unperturbed by the possibility of room temperature superconductors on Earth. I added that I should probably learn from the dragonfly.
- burnished 3y ago
  Have you ever seen a dragonfly sit still? I'm just saying, I wouldn't describe them as unperturbed.
- rtsil 3y ago
  I'd be terrified if I was the dragonfly. Its life and the lives of all other living beings depend more on what we do with our technology than on anything else.

bipop5000 3y ago

Hoverboards. I want those damn things as was prophesied by back to the future.

iancmceachern 3y ago

What things are we going to do with this material in the next 5 years? What things that I buy and use will be made better?

burnished 3y ago
You know those joke buzzer/shocker rings? Well, they're going to get really, really good.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Just what I've always wanted!

Riledcat 3y ago

We won’t be getting long distance high voltage electricity transmission lines made of this (possible) room temperature superconductor for the same reasons we don’t have high voltage long distance electricity transmission made of gold, a much better conductor than copper.

PaulHoule 3y ago

To kill your buzz: Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc. You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates. One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.

robotguy 3y ago
Reminds me of a story: I was in college physics in fall '89 and our professor was telling us how he and his son spent the summer in Alaska prospecting for whatever material was all the rage in superconductors at the time. He was explaining that when superconductors broke the liquid nitrogen temperature, it was a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid nitrogen is cheaper than beer." To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  ever bought a keg?