7 ms·

The great thing about watching advances in superconductors is that any day we could discover the first true practical room temp superconductor and that one day

The great thing about watching advances in superconductors is that any day we could discover the first true practical room temp superconductor and that one day changes the world immensely. I personally think we are likely to find one in the next 5-10 years, but that estimate is based on nothing but hope and optimism on my part.

NullHypothesist 2y ago
Better scientific understanding of the underlying process (as highlighted by this article), better pattern detection (AI), and better simulation capabilities (quantum computing) all point to accelerating progress on this front. What makes me particularly optimistic is the wide range of scenarios in which superconductivity is observed (also highlighted in the article); different mechanisms leading to a similar result suggests much better opportunity for the existence of a room-temp SC than if it were a highly similar pattern. Certainly such a discovery has some serendipity and luck baked in, but given these advances across the board, 5-10 years seems like a reasonable bet (then another decade or two to widespread adoption). Let's hope we don't blow everything up before then.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  From the final paragraph: _experimentalists are still the ones leading the way. “Everyone’s rushing as fast as they can,” Yankowitz said._ In my experience, the final line is what contributes to my optimism most: _“I can’t believe that we’re six years in and you can’t take a break.”_
dtquad 2y ago
For the most valuable applications it is also "good enough" to find a superconductor that can be cooled with cheap liquid nitrogen and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity, and thermal stability of a superconductor cooled with expensive liquid helium. Some so-called "high temperature" superconductors begin superconducting at liquid-nitrogen temperature or higher. However in real life applications like MRI and particle accelerators it turned out that they still need to be cooled with much colder liquid helium to get the desired magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity etc. Finding a high-quality liquid-nitrogen-grade superconductor with these desired properties would be a revolution in itself.
- BariumBlue 2y ago
  I know we've got cuprates, superconductors formed with copper oxide, useful up to 133Kelvin, higher than Nitrogen cooling's capability of 77K. I've read of them being used in wind turbines and particle accelerators, as well as concepts for fusion reactors. Your comment makes it sound like they have insufficient field tolerance / current characteristics though. I don't think I've heard about Cuprates at all recently.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Cuprates are also brittle ceramics so they’re difficult to shape and larger pieces and assemblies tend to run into issues with grain boundaries that interfere with superconductivity, so there’s a lot of practical issues. The classic superconductors are very low temperature but are much easier to cast.
    - FredFS456 2y ago
      There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        I invested in a couple of fusion startups (because why the hell not?), and the word on the street is that flexible tapes/wires are still not a solved question. Nobody can make them with consistent quality in large enough batches.
- NL807 2y ago
  >and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity Even if it doesn't meet those requirements, room temperature superconductors will have immense value in low-power applications, micro electronics, sensing, etc.
AlexErrant 2y ago
I'm not a believer in that timeline. There's a large distance between superconductivity in the lab and commercial application (since you specified "changes the world immensely"). E.g. MRIs still use NiTi (critical temperature of ~10 kelvins), discovered in 1962, for a number of reasons (this is in spite of MgB2 having a critical T of ~39k, ReBCO with a critical T of ~90k, and BSCCO with a critical T of ~108k): > In this paper, we analyze conductor requirements for commercial MRI magnets beyond traditional NbTi conductors, while avoiding links to a particular magnet configuration or design decisions. Potential conductor candidates include MgB2, ReBCO and BSCCO options. The analysis shows that no MRI-ready non-NbTi conductor is commercially available at the moment. For some conductors, MRI specifications will be difficult to achieve in principle. For others, cost is a key barrier. In some cases, the prospects for developing an MRI-ready conductor are more favorable, but significant developments are still needed. The key needs include the development of... [omitted] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5472374/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5472374/ Unfortunately, it probably won't be as simple as "step 1 discover material, step 2 manufacture, step 3 profit".
- jeffparsons 2y ago
  One exciting thing that could still happen in the shorter term (if/when a promising novel "high temperature superconductor" is confirmed) is an explosion of investment into research in the area. So even if it takes decades for Material X to end up in MRI machines, there would still be a steady stream of juicy progress to read about while we wait!
- FredFS456 2y ago
  There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.
IAmNotACellist 2y ago
Too soon. I still tear up over LK-99
tedsanders 2y ago
I'd bet that the first room temperature superconductor does not "change the world immensely." Resistive losses are just one of very many attributes of a conductor. Others important attributes include: - current capacity (will you need humongously thick wires to match charge carried by aluminum or copper?) - ductility (can it be formed into wires cheaply?) - cost (does CapEx outweigh electricity savings? is it expensive enough that people will cut and steal it?) - weight (can it hang from power poles? can it be transported on the backs of trucks?) - temperature sensitivity (does it crack at low temperature? melt at high temperature? change electrical properties depending on the weather? stop conducting on hot days?) - chemical stability (will it oxidize over a 50-year lifecycle?) - toxicity (will kids be poisoned if they touch it / eat it?) - machinability (can it be formed into tiny wires? can it be patterned onto chips?) - electromigration resistance (will the material break down over time from carrying charge?) - tensile strength (can it be hung from power poles at their current spacing? would we need to rip out all power poles across the planet? would we need more expensive underground lines?) - abundance in the Earth's crust (will the price skyrocket if we suddenly need to produce an annual megaton to replace the world's powerlines?) - geographic concentration (are the primary deposits concentrated in a single country, introducing potential supply chain and geosecurity risks?) - etc. It's very likely that the first material which does better on resistivity is going to do worse on these other dimensions. Resistivity is rarely the number one criterion in selecting conductors, from power lines to computer chips. One of the reason incumbent technologies are difficult to replace is that they win on criteria that are less salient to potential innovators. Aluminum is a common metal for power lines not because it has the lowest resistivity, but because it's by far the best we've got when evaluating this whole portfolio of needs.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Well lots of these limit the applications but something could have these limitations and still be a commercial success in some valuable niche fields.
- skeaker 2y ago
  I think even if it's only usable in niche scenarios it would still be a commercial success. Superconductors are useful even when they're hard to use, as seen with existing cold temperature superconductors which a room temperature one could certainly replace and become a commercial success in doing so. With that said, you're likely correct that the first attempt won't catch on for mass adoption.
EasyMark 2y ago
Why is room temperature important, what if "the world's first superconductor at 0C" was the headline?
- jmward01 2y ago
  I agree, 'room temp' isn't exactly precise. Even if it could work at 'room temp' if it didn't work just above that it would be too finicky for a lot of applications. Somewhere around there is likely the 'magic' point for a huge number of applications that will change the world. The perfect would be, of course, one with a very broad range of environments it could perform in. I think we are on track to figure out how to make something truly sci-fi in its properties: Strong, wide range of temp/conditions, flexible, etc etc. Once we get the theory perfect I bet the world will really open up.
- scheme271 2y ago
  I don't think room temperature is important per se. Rather it's shorthand for a superconductor that functions without special cooling. Even if the temperature range is somewhat limited, it's still possible to be pretty useful (e.g. deep ocean temps are fairly cold and stable so a superconducting cable to power repeaters on fiber optic cables might be useful).
tizzy 2y ago
Is their existence just speculation or is there mathematical / empirical observations that suggest they exist we just don’t know about them? Is it guaranteed, or highly likely, that one exists we just haven’t found it?
Ygg2 2y ago
I don't think we'll really see a superconductor that ticks all the boxes. Reality is too noisy for such effects to take hold. If there was I think evolution would have already used it by now.
- philipkglass 2y ago
  Do you mean biological evolution? There are a vast number of useful materials that terrestrial organisms cannot evolve because they're incompatible with the chemical/physical conditions inside living things. Organisms never evolved the use of aluminum structures, for example, even though aluminum has many useful properties and is more terrestrially abundant than carbon.
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    High temperature superconductor could in principle be inside an organism, because it's not fixed to a specific element. And energy savings would be immense.
OhioMan2943 2y ago
I don't think we need more change right now. We're struggling to make a healthy society with meaning with the leaps in technology of the past 15 years in ML and computing and manufacturing power/ actual power

NullHypothesist 2y ago

Better scientific understanding of the underlying process (as highlighted by this article), better pattern detection (AI), and better simulation capabilities (quantum computing) all point to accelerating progress on this front. What makes me particularly optimistic is the wide range of scenarios in which superconductivity is observed (also highlighted in the article); different mechanisms leading to a similar result suggests much better opportunity for the existence of a room-temp SC than if it were a highly similar pattern. Certainly such a discovery has some serendipity and luck baked in, but given these advances across the board, 5-10 years seems like a reasonable bet (then another decade or two to widespread adoption). Let's hope we don't blow everything up before then.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
From the final paragraph: _experimentalists are still the ones leading the way. “Everyone’s rushing as fast as they can,” Yankowitz said._ In my experience, the final line is what contributes to my optimism most: _“I can’t believe that we’re six years in and you can’t take a break.”_

dtquad 2y ago

For the most valuable applications it is also "good enough" to find a superconductor that can be cooled with cheap liquid nitrogen and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity, and thermal stability of a superconductor cooled with expensive liquid helium. Some so-called "high temperature" superconductors begin superconducting at liquid-nitrogen temperature or higher. However in real life applications like MRI and particle accelerators it turned out that they still need to be cooled with much colder liquid helium to get the desired magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity etc. Finding a high-quality liquid-nitrogen-grade superconductor with these desired properties would be a revolution in itself.

BariumBlue 2y ago
I know we've got cuprates, superconductors formed with copper oxide, useful up to 133Kelvin, higher than Nitrogen cooling's capability of 77K. I've read of them being used in wind turbines and particle accelerators, as well as concepts for fusion reactors. Your comment makes it sound like they have insufficient field tolerance / current characteristics though. I don't think I've heard about Cuprates at all recently.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Cuprates are also brittle ceramics so they’re difficult to shape and larger pieces and assemblies tend to run into issues with grain boundaries that interfere with superconductivity, so there’s a lot of practical issues. The classic superconductors are very low temperature but are much easier to cast.
  - FredFS456 2y ago
    There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      I invested in a couple of fusion startups (because why the hell not?), and the word on the street is that flexible tapes/wires are still not a solved question. Nobody can make them with consistent quality in large enough batches.
NL807 2y ago
>and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity Even if it doesn't meet those requirements, room temperature superconductors will have immense value in low-power applications, micro electronics, sensing, etc.

AlexErrant 2y ago

I'm not a believer in that timeline. There's a large distance between superconductivity in the lab and commercial application (since you specified "changes the world immensely"). E.g. MRIs still use NiTi (critical temperature of ~10 kelvins), discovered in 1962, for a number of reasons (this is in spite of MgB2 having a critical T of ~39k, ReBCO with a critical T of ~90k, and BSCCO with a critical T of ~108k): > In this paper, we analyze conductor requirements for commercial MRI magnets beyond traditional NbTi conductors, while avoiding links to a particular magnet configuration or design decisions. Potential conductor candidates include MgB2, ReBCO and BSCCO options. The analysis shows that no MRI-ready non-NbTi conductor is commercially available at the moment. For some conductors, MRI specifications will be difficult to achieve in principle. For others, cost is a key barrier. In some cases, the prospects for developing an MRI-ready conductor are more favorable, but significant developments are still needed. The key needs include the development of... [omitted] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5472374/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5472374/ Unfortunately, it probably won't be as simple as "step 1 discover material, step 2 manufacture, step 3 profit".

jeffparsons 2y ago
One exciting thing that could still happen in the shorter term (if/when a promising novel "high temperature superconductor" is confirmed) is an explosion of investment into research in the area. So even if it takes decades for Material X to end up in MRI machines, there would still be a steady stream of juicy progress to read about while we wait!
FredFS456 2y ago
There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.

IAmNotACellist 2y ago

Too soon. I still tear up over LK-99

tedsanders 2y ago

I'd bet that the first room temperature superconductor does not "change the world immensely." Resistive losses are just one of very many attributes of a conductor. Others important attributes include: - current capacity (will you need humongously thick wires to match charge carried by aluminum or copper?) - ductility (can it be formed into wires cheaply?) - cost (does CapEx outweigh electricity savings? is it expensive enough that people will cut and steal it?) - weight (can it hang from power poles? can it be transported on the backs of trucks?) - temperature sensitivity (does it crack at low temperature? melt at high temperature? change electrical properties depending on the weather? stop conducting on hot days?) - chemical stability (will it oxidize over a 50-year lifecycle?) - toxicity (will kids be poisoned if they touch it / eat it?) - machinability (can it be formed into tiny wires? can it be patterned onto chips?) - electromigration resistance (will the material break down over time from carrying charge?) - tensile strength (can it be hung from power poles at their current spacing? would we need to rip out all power poles across the planet? would we need more expensive underground lines?) - abundance in the Earth's crust (will the price skyrocket if we suddenly need to produce an annual megaton to replace the world's powerlines?) - geographic concentration (are the primary deposits concentrated in a single country, introducing potential supply chain and geosecurity risks?) - etc. It's very likely that the first material which does better on resistivity is going to do worse on these other dimensions. Resistivity is rarely the number one criterion in selecting conductors, from power lines to computer chips. One of the reason incumbent technologies are difficult to replace is that they win on criteria that are less salient to potential innovators. Aluminum is a common metal for power lines not because it has the lowest resistivity, but because it's by far the best we've got when evaluating this whole portfolio of needs.

SequoiaHope 2y ago
Well lots of these limit the applications but something could have these limitations and still be a commercial success in some valuable niche fields.
skeaker 2y ago
I think even if it's only usable in niche scenarios it would still be a commercial success. Superconductors are useful even when they're hard to use, as seen with existing cold temperature superconductors which a room temperature one could certainly replace and become a commercial success in doing so. With that said, you're likely correct that the first attempt won't catch on for mass adoption.

EasyMark 2y ago

Why is room temperature important, what if "the world's first superconductor at 0C" was the headline?

jmward01 2y ago
I agree, 'room temp' isn't exactly precise. Even if it could work at 'room temp' if it didn't work just above that it would be too finicky for a lot of applications. Somewhere around there is likely the 'magic' point for a huge number of applications that will change the world. The perfect would be, of course, one with a very broad range of environments it could perform in. I think we are on track to figure out how to make something truly sci-fi in its properties: Strong, wide range of temp/conditions, flexible, etc etc. Once we get the theory perfect I bet the world will really open up.
scheme271 2y ago
I don't think room temperature is important per se. Rather it's shorthand for a superconductor that functions without special cooling. Even if the temperature range is somewhat limited, it's still possible to be pretty useful (e.g. deep ocean temps are fairly cold and stable so a superconducting cable to power repeaters on fiber optic cables might be useful).

tizzy 2y ago

Is their existence just speculation or is there mathematical / empirical observations that suggest they exist we just don’t know about them? Is it guaranteed, or highly likely, that one exists we just haven’t found it?

Ygg2 2y ago

I don't think we'll really see a superconductor that ticks all the boxes. Reality is too noisy for such effects to take hold. If there was I think evolution would have already used it by now.

philipkglass 2y ago
Do you mean biological evolution? There are a vast number of useful materials that terrestrial organisms cannot evolve because they're incompatible with the chemical/physical conditions inside living things. Organisms never evolved the use of aluminum structures, for example, even though aluminum has many useful properties and is more terrestrially abundant than carbon.
- Ygg2 2y ago
  High temperature superconductor could in principle be inside an organism, because it's not fixed to a specific element. And energy savings would be immense.

OhioMan2943 2y ago

I don't think we need more change right now. We're struggling to make a healthy society with meaning with the leaps in technology of the past 15 years in ML and computing and manufacturing power/ actual power