5 ms·

Let's assume they're right. Even so, they emphasize that the structure of LK99 is so finicky, so sensitive to a misplaced atom here or there, so prone to confu

Let's assume they're right. Even so, they emphasize that the structure of LK99 is so finicky, so sensitive to a misplaced atom here or there, so prone to confusing performance in the real world due to inhomogeneity, that it's practically impossible to "get it right" with current materials synthesis technologies. It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. And that's if their models and assumptions are correct. If it works. The way I see it, the best this material can do for us is advance our theoretical understanding of superconductivity. There's no grand theory of how molecular/crystal structure relates to superconductivity. But maybe we've gotten a little bit closer.

TowerTall 3y ago
> It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. The UFO-tears were also at our level at some point. How far out in the future are we talking before humans can do this? Is there anything fundamental that would prevents us from doing it? Also, it's the replicator from Star Trek, isn't it?
- highduc 3y ago
  > It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. isn't that how your CPU is made?
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    No, your CPU is made from the top-down, via lithographic techniques. The silicon wafers are grown from the bottom-up, but silicon is as chemically simple as it gets -- a pure element! LK99 would be tougher to grow (correctly, and assuming that there is a specific superconducting configuration from among several semiconducting configurations,) by at least several orders of magnitude. Growing pristine crystals of such a complex and entropic material is something that has never been attempted.
    - highduc 3y ago
      They did show a thin film sample in their paper, where they show the superconductivity measurement setup. They even mention it is a thin film sample of the material. looks transparent on the probing station. That is what they measured for superconductivity, not the rock/ingot form. That seems to be only a sort of magnetic demo for the material, nothing more. But the superconductive applications material seems to be thin film tech, as they state in their original paper.
gary_0 3y ago
UFO-tier or semiconductor fab tier[0]. But even then there are very few physical and economical situations where you can say "let's deposit X number of atoms per square nanometer of substrate" and not get laughed at. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
- b112 3y ago
  That's silly. 15 years ago, China celebrated finally being able to domestically make a ball point pen. Why? Because the steel ball needs to be a perfect sphere, and no one in China could produce such finely honed materials prior to then. Computer chips were impossible 100 years ago, for many of the same reasons, and the chips we make today, impossible to manufacture 20 years ago. If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do. And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over. Because that's how it's worked, always. Put another way, if required, we'll do a solve. Because that's what we humans do.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    I could not believe this, so I looked it up. What I found was that in 2015 some Chinese minister complained that Chinese ball point pens were not on par with respect to writing quality when compared with non-Chinese ones. In 2017 they had this worked out and that made headlines in the West. Maybe there is more to this which I could not find right away, but as of now I could not find any evidence that China could not produce ball point pens 15 years ago, only that the quality was not top notch until 5 years ago.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Ya, it’s a quality issue. Sort of like with jet turbines: China has no problem producing fast ones, but is not yet able to produce fast ones that don’t need to be overhauled every flight. Or semiconductors: it can produce modern sized chips, but the yields are not good enough to be economically competitive yet. But these are mostly a matter of going through the same 50 years of experimentation of materials and process that other countries did. For the balls in pens, I think there was one factory in Japan that did that very well, and they had no qualms about exporting them to China at reasonable prices, so China could make pens fine enough, just the ball used in n high quality ones (which, were the ones that would actually sell) used a ball imported from Japan. The minister was angry the pens weren’t 100% Chinese, rather than just 99% Chinese. One can easily imagine that there are many such components produced in China that other countries aren’t currently tooled to produce economically, so it’s not weird or very unprecedented that China wasn’t previously set up to make perfect balls for pens.
jjallen 3y ago
The potential benefits to humanity are so great that it’s worth it to have a tiny fraction of humanity working on this and exploring it further. Similar to UAP
dogma1138 3y ago
This isn’t that different to semi conductors, we’re at about the range of single atom doping already. If this does prove as a path to high temperature super conductivity under normal or at least achievable pressures then it would open a whole new world of potential materials for material scientists to explore. Our understanding of superconductivity is already incomplete we do not have a working theory for current high temperature (~100k) superconductors either.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
highduc 3y ago
not sure why everyone completely overlooks the fact that the superconductivity measurement from their paper is made on a thin film sample which nobody replicated as there's no manufacturing details for that version of the material. whoever (from the original team) said that the ingot itself is to be tested for superconductivity?
Frost1x 3y ago
Having worked in research for a long time, once you've invested a lot of time an effort into some line of work, you're always looking for some way to continue, spin, or create the least amount of iterative difference in previous works to find funding or push an acceptable paper out. That's just the nature of the environment. Even if most the world moves on from something, the effort to change tracks is often higher than continuing down less promising routes. Now, there is some value in continued work that ignores consensus or popularity. Consensus doesn't mean absolute certainty and historically big leaps have been made in areas people consider lost causes or wastes of time pursing. So, its good that we don't abandon searching the knowledge spaces entirely, but I will say that's often not the driving motive. It has more to do with careers and putting food on the table, such is the ecosystem that is research. LK99 won't disappear for quite awhile and people will continue novel research in the area.
SkyMarshal 3y ago
Every new innovation is impossible at first, then possible but difficult, and finally trivial. If this research somehow crossed the barrier from impossible to merely difficult, that's a significant result.

TowerTall 3y ago

> It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. The UFO-tears were also at our level at some point. How far out in the future are we talking before humans can do this? Is there anything fundamental that would prevents us from doing it? Also, it's the replicator from Star Trek, isn't it?

highduc 3y ago
> It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. isn't that how your CPU is made?
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  No, your CPU is made from the top-down, via lithographic techniques. The silicon wafers are grown from the bottom-up, but silicon is as chemically simple as it gets -- a pure element! LK99 would be tougher to grow (correctly, and assuming that there is a specific superconducting configuration from among several semiconducting configurations,) by at least several orders of magnitude. Growing pristine crystals of such a complex and entropic material is something that has never been attempted.
  - highduc 3y ago
    They did show a thin film sample in their paper, where they show the superconductivity measurement setup. They even mention it is a thin film sample of the material. looks transparent on the probing station. That is what they measured for superconductivity, not the rock/ingot form. That seems to be only a sort of magnetic demo for the material, nothing more. But the superconductive applications material seems to be thin film tech, as they state in their original paper.

gary_0 3y ago

UFO-tier or semiconductor fab tier[0]. But even then there are very few physical and economical situations where you can say "let's deposit X number of atoms per square nanometer of substrate" and not get laughed at. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

b112 3y ago
That's silly. 15 years ago, China celebrated finally being able to domestically make a ball point pen. Why? Because the steel ball needs to be a perfect sphere, and no one in China could produce such finely honed materials prior to then. Computer chips were impossible 100 years ago, for many of the same reasons, and the chips we make today, impossible to manufacture 20 years ago. If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do. And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over. Because that's how it's worked, always. Put another way, if required, we'll do a solve. Because that's what we humans do.
- danbruc 3y ago
  I could not believe this, so I looked it up. What I found was that in 2015 some Chinese minister complained that Chinese ball point pens were not on par with respect to writing quality when compared with non-Chinese ones. In 2017 they had this worked out and that made headlines in the West. Maybe there is more to this which I could not find right away, but as of now I could not find any evidence that China could not produce ball point pens 15 years ago, only that the quality was not top notch until 5 years ago.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Ya, it’s a quality issue. Sort of like with jet turbines: China has no problem producing fast ones, but is not yet able to produce fast ones that don’t need to be overhauled every flight. Or semiconductors: it can produce modern sized chips, but the yields are not good enough to be economically competitive yet. But these are mostly a matter of going through the same 50 years of experimentation of materials and process that other countries did. For the balls in pens, I think there was one factory in Japan that did that very well, and they had no qualms about exporting them to China at reasonable prices, so China could make pens fine enough, just the ball used in n high quality ones (which, were the ones that would actually sell) used a ball imported from Japan. The minister was angry the pens weren’t 100% Chinese, rather than just 99% Chinese. One can easily imagine that there are many such components produced in China that other countries aren’t currently tooled to produce economically, so it’s not weird or very unprecedented that China wasn’t previously set up to make perfect balls for pens.

jjallen 3y ago

The potential benefits to humanity are so great that it’s worth it to have a tiny fraction of humanity working on this and exploring it further. Similar to UAP

dogma1138 3y ago

This isn’t that different to semi conductors, we’re at about the range of single atom doping already. If this does prove as a path to high temperature super conductivity under normal or at least achievable pressures then it would open a whole new world of potential materials for material scientists to explore. Our understanding of superconductivity is already incomplete we do not have a working theory for current high temperature (~100k) superconductors either.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

highduc 3y ago

not sure why everyone completely overlooks the fact that the superconductivity measurement from their paper is made on a thin film sample which nobody replicated as there's no manufacturing details for that version of the material. whoever (from the original team) said that the ingot itself is to be tested for superconductivity?

Frost1x 3y ago

Having worked in research for a long time, once you've invested a lot of time an effort into some line of work, you're always looking for some way to continue, spin, or create the least amount of iterative difference in previous works to find funding or push an acceptable paper out. That's just the nature of the environment. Even if most the world moves on from something, the effort to change tracks is often higher than continuing down less promising routes. Now, there is some value in continued work that ignores consensus or popularity. Consensus doesn't mean absolute certainty and historically big leaps have been made in areas people consider lost causes or wastes of time pursing. So, its good that we don't abandon searching the knowledge spaces entirely, but I will say that's often not the driving motive. It has more to do with careers and putting food on the table, such is the ecosystem that is research. LK99 won't disappear for quite awhile and people will continue novel research in the area.

SkyMarshal 3y ago

Every new innovation is impossible at first, then possible but difficult, and finally trivial. If this research somehow crossed the barrier from impossible to merely difficult, that's a significant result.