The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA).
This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution".
Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool!
Is LK-99 part of a larger (either known or emerging) class of materials? I'm not understanding what the lead and copper ions are doing to create internal stress, and why that leads to superconductivity.
And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.
Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
Just thinking about the possible applications for storage makes me dizzy. Fingers crossed.
most of the common examples are in-the-works or exist in some form, they just don't satisfy the 'every-person' checkbox yet.
AI? sure. Flying cars? sure. Robots? sure.
Fusion is in the works, too. Tens of billions of dollars being thrown into the ring by private capital -- and recently -- which is a pretty good indicator of 'perceived realistic' historically.
Also, it's kind of apples/oranges. We had equivalent mechanisms before the transistor, transistors just lead to extreme miniaturization of logic gates that we now enjoy. Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent.
similarly : room temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors are a new thing if proven possible.
It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it.
So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics.
We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. We humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5].
[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
[2] https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generate...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung
[5] https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-f...
So the smaller you make your reactor the hotter you'll have to make it to make it net positive. This leads to the counter intuitive result that making a much larger reactor is actually quite possibly easier than making a really small one. The rate of heat loss is much smaller for a larger reactor and so it becomes easier to sustain the reaction and to extract useful energy from it.
It is very well possible that none of the reactors currently on the drawing board and under construction are going to be working well enough to give us a sustained reaction resulting in net yield. But we're getting closer and closer to that and there is some (small) chance that I will still see this in my lifetime.
The catch is that as long as you can't get a small reactor to work getting funding for a much larger one (which you actually may be able to get to work) is going to be extremely difficult. We like to see proof before we scale up. In this case it may well be that such small scale proof can't be done or can't be done in a way that it it will convince backers that a larger scale device will work.
It's also nice when your reaction quits flinging antimatter at your containment vessel :)
I very much doubt currently known materials and structures could be used to construct a reactor 10 times the size of ITER.
Besides, what's the bathing suit name reference ? I don't get it.
But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out.
I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor.
Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude.
> Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences).
But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear.
Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much (except in a weapons sense) but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear.
Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2]
Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium.
There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3]
[1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
[3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it.
"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
"In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1]
The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it.
Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies.
Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1].
[edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve? How do you price in drilling in ANWR?
Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll.
Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels for their own geopolitical goals? Rare earths for wind? They all come from China too. Lithium for storage?
My question is sort of more "can anyone name any utility scale power project of any type that was built by a private entity without government subsidies of any sort? Why would they do that if they didn't have to? What does that even mean? And really, does that even matter?"
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
That's not a technical issue though.
Cost efficiency of nuclear energy has actually declined over time...which, unless science is devolving, should tell you something hinky is happening.
Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money.
For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail.
The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't.
Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
Let me introduce you to the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1].
What you probably meant is that none have been built commercially. That is true, but again as I mentioned, not because of their technical drawbacks but because of politics. In fact, the inventor of the light water reactor, Alvin Weinberg[2], was a strong proponent of the molten salt reactor over his own invention. So strong that he fired was from ORNL because he was claiming that light water reactors are inherently unsafe and that MSR is a better design.
Nixon ultimately sacked him because he (Nixon) chose to support LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) because it was being built in California, and in return he got political support that he needed. MSR ultimately lost due to pork-barrelling.
> This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
I mean you're shifting goalposts here. The "operator" has a specific meaning - someone controlling the reactor from the control room. They don't have access to the freeze plug during normal reactor operation.
But even if they did do what you're suggesting, the pressures inside the MSR are so low (on the order of couple of bars) that the damage would be quite limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
You need an energy source to make hydrogen (eg out of water, or you make it via fossil fuels etc). When you use up the hydrogen, you get some energy back out. A lot less energy, to be honest.
So it's equivalent to a battery. Not to an energy source.
Nice phrase, useful many places and I might well do that. (Unless objections are raised).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor
This was something that people said would change the world when I was in high school and it really hasn't. (For that matter, the fundamental physics is still not very well understood)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE
Liquid nitrogen is very easy to handle (ordinary thermos), liquid helium is much more expensive and harder. WHen I was in grad school the one required class was the Physics 510 lab and for that I did an experiment that involved second sound in superfluid helium and that involved cooling stuff down with liquid nitrogen first, then rolling up a huge dewar full of liquid helium, attaching a vacuum pump to get the temperature down to 2K, etc. For all that trouble you get to see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU
That said, it was a long time before really good superconducting tape for fusion reactor magnets and stuff like that became available.
The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it...
LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.
I said "It's O(n), but the constant is ridiculous in most implementations so it's usually better just to sort and then pick the kth element". The grad student friend said something that stuck with me: "Sure, but the algorithm proves it's possible to find the kth element in linear time. That was never guaranteed. Now we just need to find a better way to do it."
Random conversation that stuck with me, and they probably forgot it a moment later.
Branching off into a philosophical thought here, but I find this to be completely wrong. It was always guaranteed; logic, like physics and chemistry is not an environment that changes.
We have discovered a functioning technique which might be improved upon. What wasn’t guaranteed was that it would be found.
Biology is the root of most, perhaps all, uncertainty. After all, it is our biology that makes us imperfect observers, thinkers, and makers(but also enables us to do those things at all!).
I think this is important, because their is a significant difference in mindset between making something, and looking for something. Science is looking, technology is making. Things are always “seen” before they are “made”.
What we don't know is which we exist in.
Those are the kinds of magnetic fields the classic superconductors and the newer high-temperature superconductors can achieve.
I assume the energy lost as heat occurs due to the "current" going into the and gate having "nowhere else to go" other than to dissapate as heat?
If that's the case, simply redesigning our logic gates to have as many outputs as they have inputs, with some of these outputs feeding indirectly back to the power source without being read, seems feasible.
Not quite, it's a thermodynamic principle that applies to any way you could possibly compute AND. Basically, the laws of physics are reversible, so your computation must be reversible too. There are 4 possible inputs to an AND gate, so to be reversible there must be 4 possible outputs, one for each input. But we only want one output for the rest of our computation, so the other one dump into the environment somehow.
If we "dump the other output" back into the power source, such as the battery, does that solve the problem of not implicitly dumping it into the environment? Or is it still destroying information?
This can be worked around by introducing ancilla bits to maintain the number of states in the system, but the instant you destroy the ancilla bits (e.g. by feeding them back to the power source), you dissipate energy. The exact mechanics of this would depend on the implementation of the device you're talking about, but you'd inevitably encounter it and be unable to overcome it.
Biological systems supposedly operate at about one order of magnitude above the Landauer limit [0], i.e this is completely practical and has been happening before we even made computers... we probably wouldn't exist without being this efficient, imagine how much energy our cells would need to consume and emit as heat if it were similar to a CPU of today!
You could absolutely use superconductors for all the connecting wires, and with a little engineering it might also be good for conducting heat away from the chip die as part of the larger CPU package… it wouldn’t be a good interface material (pins for connecting to the motherboard) as you want oxidisation resistance and a level of ductility and malleability to help with making a very good electrical connection between the surfaces when they are mechanically pressed together. But overall it will have some uses, it’s just not an immediately applicable technology for the silicon chips themselves… lots of potential in circuit designs and I’m sure if someone invented a way to lay this material onto a PCB as easily as we can print copper traces on them today that inventor would get pretty rich… it’s just not likely to make much of a change to the silicon chip die itself due to the need for semiconductors to do the transistor switching …
Of course someone might have invented a superconducting transistor that I haven’t heard of and if that’s the case disregard most of what I’ve just written haha.
Turns out that some research groups have already built superconducting CPU, albeit tiny ones.
Considering how much faster super conductor logic circuits have been demonstrated to be driven [0] it might be worth the trade even with a higher fundamental limit on feature size.
A super conducting chip with far less logic could easily beat CMOS in: (1) Power performance (2) Single threaded performance (where CMOS has stalled) - but interestingly it could still compete in total throughput if the raw frequency is high enough. i.e even though there may be far less logic available compared to the latest and greatest CMOS lithography techniques - if it runs so much faster, less or simpler cores can potentially match or beat the throughput of the more parallel and specialised but slow logic available in CMOS dies.
In short, it could be like taking a step back in time to the simpler, smaller CPU days, but a huge step forward in fundamental frequency. That actually sounds like a nice trade regardless, CPUs are so insanely complex these days.
</armchair physics>
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower
I work in research, so I understand that it is very important to keep in mind the limits imposed by nature itself. Heck, I had more than one argument with idiot bosses who wanted to break the laws of physics or maths...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/new-superconductor-microprocessor-...
I don't think this actually affects the high level opcodes, i.e it's transparent, so long as the circuit implementing them somehow performs charge recovery, the high level programming can still appear to be irreversible (I don't want to think about the potential side channel attacks that causes when you want to zero some bits!).
But currently, the adiabatic chips has a bigger issue with getting to zero: their control circuitry is a bank of AWGs, each burning probably hundreds of watts at room temperature. They ideally don't produce heat in the cold zone, which is great for the cryogenic system, but if we have room temperature superconductors, that's suddenly moot.
But I can't find the original source or anything.
For some reason, there’s a contingent of people that think that by poking holes and pooh-poohing things, it gives them clout. It happens far too often in tech and I hate it. Look how often the post has “can’t” or “couldn’t”.
Instead of giving reasons why something sucks, how about being supportive and talking about why it’s awesome and what possibilities this opens up?
Edit: I appreciate you toning down the more combative part of your comment.
Impure superconductor samples often come out as a spongy mixture of superconducting and non-superconducting bits, the critical current is limited because less then 25% of the cross section is actually carrying current. When I was DIYing YBCO this is what happened most of the time. Every now and then you would get a good one.
See this patent for growing single crystals of YBCO. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6046139A/en
edit: Actually if you look at the sample picture in the paper on page 7, it looks like spongy crap. Nobel prize winning spongy crap, but still. I would expect the numbers to improve as better crystal growing methods are found.
It’s spongy grainy crap indeed… but as long as their analysis holds up to scrutiny and replication… and whoa boy do I bet there are people already trying to replicate this result as I’m typing my reply and reading the rest of the comments…. As long as the results hold up and this isn’t an abnormally low performing superconductor… i have no doubt this is going to win a Nobel prize. This has been the prize for a long time in this whole discipline, and they may have finally nailed it.
We as a species may be on the bring of a revolutionary step forward in what we can achieve in engineering and science. Better instruments and more powerful or sophisticated motors and power systems. It’s heady stuff to think it may happen in my lifetime.
You’ll still get better magnets and sensors, probably. Maybe even get new types of circuitry.
Just for comparison—we use silicon for integrated circuits. Not because it has the best performance, but because it’s convenient, it’s readily available, silicon dioxide is a good insulator, etc.
It's an interesting idea worth exploring. The two places where I think feasibility may face challenge is in the energy density gated by critical current density and magnetic field and in raw discharge rate (giant inductors are not known for being able to change their current quickly).
Knowing peak capacity and aging is also tricky since you can't measure critical limits without hitting a quench (a very, very bad scenario). You'll need to maintain healthy margins so you don't have things blowing up on sunny days or after so many charge/discharge cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
Compare with this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...
Compared to the discovery of fire, the changes from room temperature superconductors would be a flash fire.
Maglevs are also a popular guess - safer, faster, and more power efficient ground mass transport would be a huge thing.
Maybe even magnetic rail space launches.
And, of course, military applications (the last few examples I mentioned involve acceleration of big-ish masses to surreally high velocities, which is popular approach to weaponry).
So in addition to any immediate practical applications there's also this element of cracking a famous long unsolved problem. It'd be like if we discovered definitive proof that P != NP, or a theoretical basis for FTL communications. Even with no immediate practical applications it'd still be huge news.
I wouldn't say that it was necessarily "theoretically possible," for there has never been, and there still isn't, a grand theory of how any given material's atomic/crystalline structure relates to superconductivity. In other words, with no theory of material superconductivity, it was never quite clear what's possible and what isn't. With this new material, though, we might get a lot closer to a working model, if nothing else.
Which would enable us to put a lot of solar power in the desert and move it around effectively to other places on Earth.
Again, with the right material properties it could also produce efficient storage, and that also has huge implications for electrical generation.
If you lose 20% to the grid, then build a 20% bigger solar farm.
Solar farms actually help with reversing desertification by reducing water losses from direct exposure to sunlight.
People would have suggested things like cities in the sky, looking down on things, and traversing marshland easily.
The actual main use for planes has turned out to be fast long distance travel. But we don't actually theoretically need to be up in the air to travel fast or far - in fact, had we never invented the aeroplane, we'd probably have cars or trains by now that moved as fast as present day planes do.
The revolutionary effect of new inventions is often hard to see, particularly for basic science research like superconductors.
I don't know enough to be sure on the certainty of that model, but it seems well supported. So I'd be surprised if only improving the material quality was enough to make it strong.
I’m also very curious what kind of inductors you could make for switching power supplies using superconductors.
I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form) had a field trip to Culham and also a double lesson/lecture done by a handful of Culham physicists back in school. I am very aware of what a privilege that was.
Now I'm 53 and been around the block a bit, I really appreciate how time is required for some things. A lot of time.
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
If superconductance can be reliably demonstrated at RTP (you wear a light cotton shirt, instead of 1cm thick fancy weaves involving an awful lot of rubber) then we are laughing all the way to ameliorating climate change.
Even if this result is confirmed then I think it will take at least 20 years to dig in to reversing climate change.
We live in unpleasant times.
That in turn could power an energy revolution which has the potential to reduce carbon based fuel consumption dramatically.
That's SF right now, but there are pathways to very interesting futures unlocked by a material such as the one described in the paper, all of them subject to the usual caveats that it's a 'mere matter of engineering' and that it may prove to be far too costly in practice. And it wouldn't reverse climate change but it could help slow down the acceleration of climate change.
Quite a bit more than chemical, in other words, the chief problem being what happens if it quenches. Or the cables break.
And cost.
That does make for an interesting failure mode if anything should every cause a small spot on a longer conductor to reach that temperature...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zib4IV2TIg
It stays lit until the breaker goes at 3:57.
Of course, there are huge hurdles to such a project even if we did have the superconducting lines, but there are more realistic similar applications that might actually work.
We can easily generate more than enough renewable energy, just not when and where we need it. Being able to transmit energy over vast distances would greatly improve the economics of our existing renewable energy generation solutions.
There's no technical impairment for doing this with current tech, and it's not clear the new tech is cheaper.
Power lines are already very efficient, especially the long-distance ones. We would save a bit on converting from HVDC to AC but that's also very efficient.
It would be lovely ironic if in the future we all drove ICE cars, but just fuelled by clean and carbon-neutral gasoline.
Everyone’s generation thought the world was falling apart.
But it continues to get better.
I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).
As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too. Here we are, magazines extinct, with fusion startups using LN2 superconductors. Also: no quantum computers, no space colonies, no flying cars (or even supersonic planes), and twitter/reddit/facebook are worse than Usenet.
Also, no fusion startup I know of is using LN2 for superconductors. Liquid helium offers too much performance and quench margin with YCBO.
> As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too.
But how many of them predicted their use in ~36,000 advanced medical imagery devices world-wide?
I'd love fusion power (and flying cars), too, but there's a whole lot of interesting technology between "check out my shiny new super-conductor" and "let's use it to contain plasma that's hotter-than-the-core-of-the-sun-kind-of-hot[0]" that we do benefit from[1], today, to not be too disappointed that we haven't quite reached the greatest potentials.
I don't know enough to speak intelligently on any of this -- who knows -- maybe fusion won't be a possibility until even higher-temperature super-conductors are created ... or maybe there's some other "not possible" in the way (until another discovery is made).
[0] And (if I understand things correctly) it's probably really unfortunate that they traditionally require extreme cooling, likely made more complex given the heat involved and almost certainly requiring far more power than would be required if said super-conductors worked at much higher temperatures.
[1] Myself, personally -- and I have a pretty cool 3D file of my brain backed up to my server as a result.
/// apologies: reading this over it sounded a little hostile; that wasn't intended -- I was merely offering a competing perspective, albeit poorly :)
> I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point
And each discovery can change our understanding of other things/accelerate discovery in other areas.
[0] So much as such a thing can exist
The 1980's discoveries were of the first "high temperature" superconductors (where "high temperature" means "above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen").
Liquid nitrogen is much easier to deal with than liquid helium.
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
If you could use it to make circuits, especially of a high level of integration then it might well be something much more interesting (Josephson tunneling is briefly mentioned in the article). That could theoretically give rise to very efficient switching gear and if it can be miniaturized enough to efficient CPUs and memory. This is because the typical transistor uses power mostly in the time between the transition between the 'on' state and the 'off' state, when it is acting as a resistor. If you could get rid of that resistance during the transition then you might be able to reduce the amount of power a given circuit uses, but there are still lower limits off losses that you won't be able to escape, so it will not make your CPU magically use zero energy.
Given the contents of the paper such applications are a very long way off and may in fact never happen. Let's first see (1) if it is true and (2) if it is true how well it stacks up against copper wire of the same diameter and commercially available super conductors in terms of cost and practical current carrying capability. If that's all good then this will really be a game changer.
There is also extra thick copper clad board ('heavy copper PCBs').
I'd also like to use this for antennas, transmission lines, and tuned cavities.[4] There are a lot of things you could do at VLF frequencies[5] that require long, long wires... with lots of resistance, unless you have a defense budget, the resistance eats into efficiency. Superconductors could help deal with that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_wave#Electromagne...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_radio_frequenc...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency#Amateur_use
It would be super room temperature
I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon.
1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf
2. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&hl=en
3. Mott transition in VO2 revealed by infrared spectroscopy and nano-imaging: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t notice), electrets (seems pretty unlikely here), very extreme amounts of static charge (again, seems unlikely), and actual superconductivity (would be awesome).
Random bits of cooked oxides, ceramics, and such don’t float on a magnet.
ETA: the video referenced is apparently available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k . Interestingly, posted on Feb 26, 2023.
I've linked to a relevant example in a Veritasium video here: https://youtu.be/g0amdIcZt5I?t=543
But in this sample video, the standoff distance doesn't appear to be slowly dropping at all, which would rule out eddy currents as a source of the behavior. If you continue watching the linked video to 13:27, he talks about how and why superconductors levitate.
Copper and a magnet can certainly interact. Drop a magnet through a copper pipe and the eddy currents will induce a field that's opposed to the magnet causing a damping effect. Maybe something like this is going on where movement of the magnetic field is inducing an opposed magnetic field in the copper, and thus interacting.
Anyhow it will be interesting. if It can generate a field of 1.5-2 Tesla you could have more efficient solenoids and probably motors.
As far as I know a stable arrangement of permanent magnets levitating is impossible without a baring surface to keep them aligned. (i.e. free floating levitation is not possible without active control)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism
https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=diamagnetic-levitatio...
...and superconductors are usually perfectly diamagnetic.
* ferromagnetic - attracted to one pole of a magnet but not the other (in a given orientation), this is what everybody thinks of when they think of "magnets"
* paramagnetic - attracted to both poles, i.e. stuff that sticks to magnets
* diamagnetic - repelled by both poles, except in superconductors, this effect is very weak compared to the forces experienced involving ferro-ferro or fero-paramagnetic materials.
There isn't another category, everything fits in to one of those buckets.
Saying
>Just so everyone is on the same page, static passive diamagnetic levitation is possible with materials like pyrolytic graphite.
is a bit deceptive, as what people know as "magnetic" materials are ferromagnetic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03048...
And many others besides. Halbach arrays are fascinating.
Halbach arrays with compensating coils have been proposed for some interesting applications, such as low loss flywheels for electrical storage. I don't know if that ever got commercialized but I do recall that some prototypes were made by a US company. I can't find a reference to it though.
Not too much longer apparently...
Is it late April Fools joke?
It can’t be true.
Edit: I am not surprised it levitates. I am astonished by how much it will reshape our world if it is real room-temp and ambient-pressure superconductor. Also is easy to produce. Just too good to be true.
You could almost make this stuff in a pizza oven.
Edit: Judging by Fig 4, which has a large object conspicuously labeled "magnet", that's probably what they're referring to.
This group used somewhat nastier powders, they had to cook parts of it in a vacuum, and they floated the result on a magnet instead of vice versa. And it only floated a bit. But they did it without any cooling!
So, yeah: big if true.
> Detritus blinked. There was a tinkle of falling ice. Odd things were happening in his skull. Thoughts that normally ambulated sluggishly around his brain were suddenly springing into vibrant, coruscating life. And there seemed to be more and more of them.
> 'My goodness,' he said, to no-one in particular.
> This was a sufficiently un-troll-like comment that even Cuddy, whose extremities were already going numb, stared at him.
> 'I do believe,' said Detritus, 'that I am genuinely cogitating. How very interesting!'
> 'What do you mean?'
> More ice cascaded off Detritus as he rubbed his head.
> 'Of course!' he said, holding up a giant finger. 'Superconductivity!'
> 'Wha'?'
> 'You see? Brain of impure silicon. Problem of heat dissipation. Daytime temperature too hot, processing speed slows down, weather gets hotter, brain stops completely, trolls turn to stone until nightfall, ie, colder-temperature,however,lowertemperatureenough,brain operatesfasterand—'
> [...] Detritus sat down again. Life was so simple, when you really thought about it. And he was really thinking. He was seventy-six per cent sure he was going to get at least seven degrees colder.
-- Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett
[0]https://www.greenoptimistic.com/make-superconductor-home/
The failure modes would mostly be the same as for the big ones: sucking in metal chairs if you're not careful.
If this proves true I'd see their use more in electronic circuits. Novel sensors etc rather than classic high power high field uses people dream about when the words "room temperature superconductivity" gets thrown about.
Most people aren't licking the insides of their computer processors, fusion reactors, radio telescopes and MRIs.
For instance in EU, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/environmenta...
Compared to refining traditional conductors and recycling/disposing of used electronics?
> you still have to use lead-free solder
One, fumes. Two, people touch their solder and then grab a cookie.
We're premature. The results need to be proven. But the benefits of RTP superconductors is mindblowingly high enough that risks from lead contamination (far from a novel problem, I might add) can be safely ignored.
You might want to read more in the links I shared about the harmful effects of lead before "whatabouting" to other problems of electronics recycling/waste.
and yes, it's entirely possible this application would get an exemption from usual restrictions on lead. For example in the EU directive, one of the exemptions is:
> Lead in solders for servers, storage and storage array systems, network infrastructure equipment for switching, signalling, transmission, and network management for telecommunications
But people don't, particularly students, and sometimes they also let their irons run too hot at which point fumes become an issue. Also, there is an easy alternative, so why not.
If the choice is lead superconductor or not, nobody is going to pause on a use case because there is lead. If they do, and if this is real, please let me know--I'd love to have them as competition.
> might want to read more in the links I shared about the harmful effects of lead before "whatabouting" to other problems of electronics recycling/waste
The point is, whether a RTP superconductor does or doesn't contain lead is irrelevant to its adoption. The advantages are too large. What current directives say are, similarly, irrelevant.
IMO, the most dangerous thing about lead solder is cleaning the iron. Both the common methods (damp sponge and brass wool) create many tiny little balls of solder that are hard to see and bounce about all over the place. Because of the high density of lead they're less affected by air resistance than you might expect, and they roll easily, so they can move surprising distances. They can easily end up caught in clothing, and from there fall into food. This will result in much higher lead ingestion than just touching solder then touching food.
I personally always use lead-free solder. If you have a good temperature controlled soldering iron it's nearly as easy to use as leaded solder.
The last time I checked, low-temperature bismuth-tin alloy is only available as solder paste, unfortunately not available as flux-core solder wires (they're not really a good choice for connectors to begin with as the alloy is brittle, but I only need it to survive before the next prototype...)
It's trivial to experimentally demonstrate that solder fume contains almost no lead, the quantity is negligible. Claiming the contrary is the electronics equivalent of saying HTML is a programming language. Please don't do that again. The fume is indeed toxic, but it's due to the VOCs from the flux core, not the lead in the alloy.
A more solid (no pun intended) argument can be the hazards of debris. Furthermore, in my opinion, a newer and more serious problem of leaded solder today, in a workshop setting, is its use in solder paste. Solder paste and a reflow oven are required for prototyping any circuit boards with surface-mount components (SMT) - basically any modern circuit board today. Solder paste is a tube of toothpaste-like chemical mixture that contains tiny, micrometer-sized metal particles, mixed with sticky flux. If they're used without care, a solder paste spill is a sure way to contaminate the floor or work surface of your workspace. The sticky paste is also hard to wash away from skin.
Unfortunately, reflow soldering of surface-mount components can be really challenging, even more so when doing it by hand. Thus, classic lead-tin alloy is often used to reduce difficulties of assembly during workshop prototyping due to its technically superior properties. Switching to lead-free is only possible when you have a tightly-controlled and consistent work flow.
If you want lead-free, for small-scale prototyping and rework, a non-toxic bismuth-tin alloy is sometimes a good alternative to standard SAC305 lead-free solder thanks to its low melting temperature, which is one main reason that makes most lead-free alloys difficult to use (it even has considerable popularity in mass production of LED devices, as they are heat-sensitive). But its surface tension is slightly different, weakening the self-alignment effect of components during reflow soldering, increasing the chance of defective joints - a concern in prototyping. Its brittle nature also increases failure rates in the field, among other caveats.
Lead is really a gift from the devil.
This is incorrect. You can easily do small scale work with almost all SMT components without solder paste. Solder paste is required for automated assembly processes. But almost anything done by hand can also be done with conventional solder.
Source: I worked as an electronics designer for a few years, and assembled prototypes and small production batches by hand with SMT parts (0603's, TTSOPS, etc) every day.
The one exception is BGA devices, because the solder pads are underneath the device. But doing those by hand requires precise alignment that is difficult enough that few people do it. Also, for smaller BGA devices with fewer pins, skilled operators can still solder them in place with a heat gun by covering the pads with solder and flux and just melting them into place.
I disagree. I don't consider 0603 passives and TSSOP packages "modern" anymore. Of course these components can be hand soldered with ease (possibly at top quality with the aid of a microscope). Unfortunately, the industry is gradually abandoning TSSOP and QFP in favor of DFN, QFN, and LFCSP in recent years. For anything that does high-speed signaling or multiplexing above 1 Gbps (which is old by computer's standard) like USB 3.0, PCIe 1/2, QFN goes without the need for a mention (short of using BGA). But the thing is, even in simpler ICs like DC-DC controllers, you can see the same trend. Simple RFICs are another source of heavy users of these packages, reduced circuit parasitics is certainly a factor.
These packages are all leadless, and frequently with thermal pads at the bottom. An older term for leadless packages is BTC - Bottom Termination Components. [1] After a few successive and multiple failed QFN soldering attempts, I switched to ordering stencil, solder paste, and a hot plate. It worked perfectly on my first attempt, so I never looked back.
Unless you have top 10% soldering skills, which I don't (experienced smartphone repair technicians seems to have mastered the art of QFN), I found solder paste is required for maintaining your sanity with leadless packages. Furthermore, without reflow soldering, prototype assembly can be very time-consuming and takes hours, especially when you need 3 or more prototypes.
Occasionally, leadless packages also have optional difficulties turned on, completely eliminating the possibility of hand soldering, such as multiple bottom pads for different nets (to minimize parasitic inductance), or having two layers of contacts, one row on the exterior and on row on the interior.
> You can easily do small scale work with almost all SMT components without solder paste. [...] The one exception is BGA devices
And DFN, and QFN, and LFCSP, and...
Thanks to industrial and automotive users, some ICs still have QFP versions for these markets (due to their vibration resistance) that are friendly for hand operation, but you have to pay a premium.
Finally, even plain-old QFP chips have bottom thermal pad these days (in that case, you can manually apply a blob of solder on the PCB and reflow again with a hot air gun, but manually apply a drop of paste is easier to work with).
---
[1] But these days it would make people think it's some kind of a Bitcoin mining ASIC. BTW, the last time I've checked, these ASICs are indeed QFN, so one can say they're BTC BTC chips...
Not being in sciences I can’t tell if this sentence is legit or you just got a good joke in there
"Lead in solders for servers, storage and storage array systems, network infrastructure equipment for switching, signalling, transmission, and network management for telecommunications"
( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... )
The bar is even lower than that. For example, bullets are still made of lead, not because it's necessary, but because it's cheap, and despite the fact that it contaminates the meat of the hunted animal with lead.
The consumer market still uses it, which is probably a tiny fraction of what the military uses in training.
First, terms - brass is not used to "jacket" a bullet. Brass is used as the case material for the cartridge. Steel, and nickel plated steel are some times also used here. "Jacketing" (as in, Full Metal Jacket) refers to the material that wraps around the exterior of the projectile. As far as I'm aware, the material used here is almost always copper, or a copper alloy (cupronickel).
The US standard bullet is the M855. It's a lead core with a soft soft steel penetrator at the tip, that's jacketed with copper.
There's an advanced version of the M855, the M855A1, which is an entirely steel slug, jacketed with copper. This bullet has better terminal performance at longer ranges, and slightly better armour piercing capabilities.
The US army standard training round is the M193. It is a lead bullet jacketed with copper. Interestingly, it in many ways has better terminal performance than the M855 because this is the bullet the M16 and M4 rifles were designed around, and the M855 only exists because of NATO politics.
There are no bullets in the US inventory, to my knowledge, that use a copper core. Copper is simply far too expensive to be used at that scale, and, as you pointed out, reduces the weight of the projectile which has negative effects on terminal performance.
"Why are bullets jacketed in copper" you might be wondering here - when rifle cartridges were invented, they still used black powder, and all bullets were lead. When smokeless powder was invented, it became possible to have more explosive power per unit of volume. However, this had two negative effects - one, the lead projectile would either disintegrate, or became entirely inaccurate, at the speeds it was accelerated to. Second, the force of the bullet against the rifling of the barrel was rubbing away metal from the bullet, leaving lead deposits which fouled the gun and made it inaccurate. All steel bullets solved this problem, but increase the wear on the barrel. The solution was to coat (jacket) each bullet in a thin layer of copper, which was stiff enough to withstand the force of friction in air, while also softer than the steel barrel and reduced wear and tear on the rifles
>There are no bullets in the US inventory, to my knowledge, that use a copper core. Copper is simply far too expensive to be used at that scale . . .
Photos of cross sections of the M855 and M855A1:
https://twitter.com/izlomdefense/status/1202516482082639872/...
M855 has a lead plug behind a steel penetrator. M855A1 has a copper plug behind a steel penetrator. So, I stand by my "copper where the lead used to be". I never said there wasn't a steel penetrator.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.56%C3%9745mm_NATO:
>For general issue, the U.S. Army adopted the M855A1 round in 2010 to replace the M855. The primary reason was pressure to use non-lead bullets. The lead slug is replaced by a copper alloy slug . . . The U.S. Marines adopted the Mk318 in early 2010 due to delays with the M855A1. This was a temporary measure until the M855A1 was available for them, which occurred in mid-2010"
As you probably know, most combat soldiers in the US Army and Marines carry a rifle (usually an M4 these days IIUC) that fires 5.56×45mm NATO, so it is probably the ammo type that the US military uses the most of.
Yes the M855A1 was developed and started operational testing in 2010. However, it wasn't available to anyone who wasn't forward deployed until...my memory says 2015. The M855 is still used on post because a) it's cheap, and ballistically similar to the M855A1 and b) the production lines at Lake City are still geared for them
The Marine corps didn't formally adopt the M855A1 until 2017/2018. Brass didn't like it because it broke the feed ramps on machine guns. There was a big procurement SNAFU about this.
Marine corps times article on the matter:
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2017...
I get that you're trying to be snide because you were so publicly wrong, but your tone here really just makes you sound like you're trying to sound smart about something you know nothing about. Something to consider. Frantic googling does not an expert make.
You're right about the copper core on the new model A1 - I thought it was steel entirely with thin jacket. I would argue that when, by weight, the majority of the bullet is steel, my original point still holds.
>I get that you're trying to be snide because you were so publicly wrong, but your tone here really just makes you sound like you're trying to sound smart
Right back at you. I don't think I'm motivated by trying to sound smart, but rather by curiosity about the subject. Well, OK, half by wanting to sound smart (and win arguments) and half by curiosity.
In particular, I'm still curious about whether ammunition containing lead is still routinely used by the US military--if you still want to talk about it. I realize Wikipedia can be totally wrong. So far I haven't succeed in wringing information out of Google Search that would corroborate or support your assertion. When's the last time you (or someone you know to usually tell the truth) has observed M855 being used by the US military in significant quantities?
EDIT TO ADD: I don't know if that qualifies as "quantities" and anecdotes are just that, but that's been my experience.
As I understood the standard M4 with 1:7 barrel can't shoot M193 accurately
Those are often bismuth weights.
As for how to avoid lead poisoning, coat the lead with a thin layer of some substance, perhaps a plastic or rubber that doesn’t affect its magnetic capabilities.
Or perhaps they can galvanize it with safer metal, leaving a really small part exposed.
It'd likely be exempt though.
If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days.
If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster.
Hopefully it repros.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf page 3
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE
I wouldn't call it an easy process, but it's achievable without highly specialized equipment. Just a torch and a vacuum pump.
True.
> and permanently for the better.
You can't know that.
If the projectile is ferromagnetic, or potentially even just diamagnetic, a defense system involving shaped ultra-high intensity magnetic fields becomes conceivable.
Furthermore, shooting ranges are full of lead in the ground. The laws around here(Poland) require a cleanup by specialised companies every few years and a concrete slab to separate the lead/soil mix from the groundwater near the targets, but still there are tons of the stuff just sitting there for years and no one gets hurt. Fun fact. These specialised cleanup companies don't cost anything for big ranges. They're either free, or they pay the shooting club that owns the range money, because the lead they recover is worth a lot.
So don't blow lead smoke over your neighbors house.
I wonder, does everyone that scared of lead own smartphones? (with cadmium in their batteries). Cadmium is very toxic and it boils at under 800C so your average wood flame will vaporise it. But everyone talks about lead.
Why? IMO because lead used to be added to petrol/gas as an anti knock agent. So there was quite a bit of contamination present back in the day. This has been outlawed decades ago, but the collective memory remains.
"No one gets hurt" - perhaps no one dies, but there are no safe levels of lead exposure.
Really.
It's more likely that you will contaminate your land, and possibly your neighbors land too than that you will manage to replicate it.
(Which would effectively make a bizarre form of brass a superconductor)
Brass is copper and zink.
Chernobyl wasn't the accident people seem to think. It wasn't inevitable, it was the result of numerous self-serving decisions exacerbated and even required in the very messed up Soviet system of management that enforced following the party instructions over all other possible complications.
And much of the cost of nuclear is hedging against these decisions, whether by profit-seeking or the tyranny of a totalitarian state
The solution isn't to abandon nuclear power, but to make it very costly for aggressors to meddle with it. E.g., deploy UN forces to the plant at the first sign of trouble.
If the latter, it implies a cloth versus fibre topology, which forces an interesting rethink of many paradigms forced by the ductility of our present conductors.
Either they blatantly photoshopped the photo or they actually made a room temperature super conductor. I can’t see how the could have made a subtle mistake that resulted in magnetic levitation at room temp without making a superconductor.
I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
It seems this is worth cautious excitement, but don't get too excited yet.
After all, there's no need for expensive cooling and the material looks reasonably cheap! (assuming it's real, of course..)
It's possible that they already normalized the figure, and if that's the case then 125 mA/cm^2 would be 'bad news' in the sense that even though the temperature and pressure are much better than other superconductors the critical current is much, much worse. But given the way the paper is formulated I'm not sure if that is a proper reading and it is very well possible that they are talking about a particular thin film sample (which would make it a small fraction of a square centimeter in cross section) and how much current they passed through that sample. In which case the situation would be much better already, especially if it turns out that the sample was extremely thin and/or narrow.
Too early to tell without more information.
For comparison, high temperature superconductors (in this context high temperature means tens of degrees kelvin) like the recently rather revolutionary ReBCO has critical current values measured in hundreds of thousands of amps per square centimeter. That would be a factor of a million.
This is clearly a very early result and until they have more insight into how it works (assuming it really works...) we'll have to be patient before we get more meaningful figures on the actual current carrying capacity of thicker conductors made out of this stuff. They were happy enough to be able to prove superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure, clearly they are still a ways away from being able to line up a comparison with ReBCO with respect to current density. But surely that will happen soon if this is real.
>In 2008, Gozar et al. reported hightemperature interface superconductivity between metallic and insulating copper oxides(39). The thinner the layer, the greater the stress-inducing effect, the greater the strain, which seems to be the higher the superconducting transition temperature. Therefore, we argue that the stress caused by temperature and pressure brings a minute structural distortion and strain, which create an electronic state for superconductivity.
So the paper seems to confirm this, though the authors seem to be hopeful for general applications.
What we have here seems to be a clever trick to have ambient pressure superconductors by introducing crystal structure/microstructure stresses.
>But surely that will happen soon if this is real.
What I'm saying it that this is not so sure, may not be possible for a bulk material, may be insanely too expensive to be useful otherwise, and may be limited to very niche applications where milliamp superconductors might be useful (think sensors, microchips, and the like)
Sure is cool, but at the same time... cool your jets, eh?
As for cooling my jets: I don't think we'll see any real application of this in the next 10 years at a minimum, this stuff is the first step on a very long road towards commercialization. From the first mention of the photo electric effect (~1890) to practical (1956), affordable (1990's) solar panels took roughly a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells
I hope that this superconductor, assuming it's real can be fast tracked given our much improved knowledge of materials and fabrication methods. But I'm realistic enough to realize how much work would still have to be done even if it is real. The road from the lab to the shelf is a long and expensive one and even in the best of scenarios I can't imagine anything on a timescale of less than a decade.
No, only ferromagnetic material would behave like that. Copper foil will also move in a moving magnetic field, and won't be attracted to a stationary magnet.
On reality, you would need a good computer with a large set of sound emitters just outside of the screen and a huge lot of tries. It would be a project for a small team and many months of work.
Or maybe a few transparent wires and less photoshop.
I do think the easiest way to fake a video like that would be to use a cool superconductor and change the atmosphere so nobody notices its temperature.
The bits and pieces of this certainly look like little are being genuine, so the new question is what non-obvious mistake could they be making?
And given the easiness in reproducing the study, there doesn't seem to be any point in fabricating it.
Like you'd question why someone would photoshop results[1] in a paper, because surely they'd have to realize they're fabricating data, but they go ahead and do it anyway.
The videos are convincing but are they of what they really purport to show? I agree - what would be the point of fabricating it. But weirder things have happened in the breadth of human experience.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/who-scientists-used-photoshop-to...
Nonscientific objections:
* it was published in a low h-index journal (not a scientific objection)
* poor formatting, misspelled title (not a scientific objection)
* patented and has a company (not a scientific objection)
* seems too simple, it has to be more complex than that, how could we have missed that? (not a scientific objection, also rather ahistorical)
I consider all of these pretty irrelevant given that the authors are not no-names and the actual paper makes clear claims, does exactly what everyone says you should be able to do if you have a real superconductor (show a video of it floating!) and makes replication easy. If it's straight up fraud it will be easy to discover.
There were also many pseudoscientific objections raised by field-adjacent people that I found uncompelling, responses from people actually in the field in parentheses:
* The first video looks like normal copper, the second like other diamagnetic materials or is otherwise unconvincing (not evidence against it being superconducting, at least one materials science lab had several members look at it and thought it looked legit).
* They are trying to hide the magnet structure somehow (the video shows it in clear view).
* The wafer isn't fully levitating or the way it falls is suspicious (not really unexpected given that the superconductive part is supposed to be present in only a few percent of the material).
Scientific objections I find more compelling made by people more familiar with the field, but more bourne of natural skepticism than disqualifying, with there being a lot of subtlety:
* both effects shown can be achieved in known ways by non-superconducting materials (but at the same time? would at least be a major material science advance in that case as it would apparently require diamagnetism ~ 150x as strong as graphite. Author who mentioned this said it would be "materials science magic" and I'm not sure why you'd rather believe in this than superconductivity given that neither have ever been seen before and it's consistent with sueprconductivty. Unless it's straight up fraud).
* Mesner effect graph don't go exactly to zero / happen exactly where you'd expect, maybe reflects a measurement error? (apparently, given the small % of the material that's supposed to be superconducting and material distribution, this isn't really evidence either way. not like we have other room temperature superconductors to compare it to).
* no max temperature where superconductivity vanishes measured, so is it really superconducting? (standard measurement devices only go up to what they reported, scientists seem very mixed about whether it would be easy to DIY measurement at higher temperatures for such a small current)
* not a similar mechanism to known good past "high-temperature" superconductors, and proposed explanation doesn't really make sense given slight deviations in pressure compared to what is in this substance (other scientists seem to disagree and think there could be something there, but it would also not be the first time something novel was discovered and worked for reasons totally different than those the scientists initially imagined)
Overall I find the quality of the objections really weak which increases (to me) the chances that there is something novel here, even if it's not superconductivity. That or it's obvious fraud and we'll know in like three days.
Fortunately if we're dealing with a real effect, this will be easily replicated and proven. But with the fixed perspective of a video, you can create a large number of apparent effects that look real in the constraints of the video format.
The biggest point in favor is that there's full reproduction instructions. I am eagerly waiting someone to try and pull this together separately.
Where I get hung up is, it's an extraordinary, world-changing claim. The standard of proof is very high (and while I could get access to a kiln, I can't get access to high pressure vacuum vessel on short notice).
* he and his team did discover a (probably) novel diamagnetic material. * it may or may not have interesting properties * however, it is not superconductive.
According to people who were able to more fully read the "real" paper, the key issue is that their measurements, if taken at face value (and not as due to, e.g., bad contacts with the material) suggest two contradictory things:
* the sample is extremely pure (due to the shape of the first graph).
* the sample has impurities causing it to not exhibit zero resistance, and not to exhibit "full" superconductive properties (i.e. having zero resistance under a magnetic field with increasing strength).
Additionally, since they were never able to measure Tc, they can't show the full Meissner effect as that requires heating up the sample to above its Tc first and then cooling it and flipping it, something you can't do with a diamagnet. By itself the fact that they didn't reach this temperature did not bother me, because I assumed that the senior authors were experts in superconductivity and had made sure that the material simultaneously exhibited other superconductive properties like zero resistance (or close enough when factoring in impurities). The fact that they were so focused on replication and the process was so simple made it unlikely to be fraud.
But, the fact that the first chart doesn't make sense unless the sample were completely pure, plus the lack of expertise they have with superconductors, indicates that it is much more likely measurement error on their parts, in which case it's not clear whether there's any evidence at all for superconductivity right now outside the diamagnetism. Given that there are many room temperature diamagnets known (albeit perhaps none as strong as this one?) and no room temperature superconductors known, this puts the odds that this isn't a superconductor at practically certain, IMO.
He should hold it in his hand for 10 seconds before the test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruko_Obokata#STAP_cell_contr...
I don't really have an explanation other than they're simply crazy.
> And why fake it in the first place? I don't see the benefit.
Other comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36867758
Several physicists have spoken up and said this, and a few other tells distinguishes it from any conventional materials, which is why they made the video to begin with I'm sure.
That said I'm just parroting back the things I've picked up from this discussion.
If you move the magnet, the metal will also move since you're inducing a current and the fields from the eddy currents will react against the moving magnet.
That is super cool!
That said, I'm enough of a layman not to be able to connect this explanation to what I saw in the video.
Are you saying because it wasn't moving in "slow motion," we can rule out non-ferrous metals? Or are you saying the alternating movement/stillness of the magnet shows this?
All I see is the normal dampening and dragging effects that I show in my physics classroom.
I can tell it doesn't react to a magnet in ways that I'm familiar with (copper, iron, other magnets), but that's all the detail I can tell from the video.
Which is a weird thing to do when for superconductors you shouldn't need it, but for pyrolytic graphite levitation you would (to get an N-S pole).
But I'm just parroting back what the physicists in the thread have shared, so I might have some details wrong.
i.e. not like some of the ones you'd see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy9uWXgbKy0
But it still looks dependent on their being a NS pole at a corner.
That said...from this video https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n I'm very suspicious of the behavior you see in the last few seconds where it gets pushed over to the corner and seems to fall right to the magnet That would be consistent with their being a ring magnet underneath the top magnet their, and once suitably over into the corner it loses the diamagnetic property because there's no N-S pole. The "seam" on what should be a bulk magnet in both videos that are out seems like an obvious problem.
So yeah...I think put me down for this is diamagnetism with pyrolytic carbon (the image in the paper also notably hides what you see in the video - that there's a seam on the magnet where it looks like it's a stack of two).
Given the apparent size/strength of the magnets, you could probably replicate that with a silver coin
The video headline says: "Magnetic Property Test of LK-99 Film".
That's how copper acts with a moving super magnet[0], so the video doesn't really show anything.
But still rather unconvincing.. especially if this is the best they could produce as a levitation proof video to publish.
I agree with swamp40: the video you linked is not demonstrating the Meissner effect, and is just showing Lenz's law.
It's on arXiv, which is a preprint journal, which means it has no peer-review; and is therefore generally less trustworthy (especially when the paper has no connection to a technical conference or is not being published elsewhere, and is in a non-computer science or mathematics field).
In addition to this, claims of room-temperature superconductors have been mired in controversy or otherwise proven false:
- http://www.superconductors.org/roomnano.htm (2004)
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11443 (2012)
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-superconductor-... (2018)
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/room-temperature-superconduct... (2020)
- https://forbetterscience.com/2023/03/29/superconductive-frau... (2022-2023)
Considering that many fraudulent claims of room-temperature superconductivity have gotten into Nature and other top-tier publications, I would wait for multiple independent recreations of the results in the paper.
That said, from the video it mentions the superconductor was applied as a film over copper. But wouldn't plain copper also exhibit this effect due to eddy currents? I fail to see how the (supposedly) thin film is affecting the plate in this experiment. I'm probably missing something and I hope someone can enlighten me.
There was previously research done investigating how changes in atomic structural alignment affect superconductivity (such as by cooling). I think researchers were trying to maintain the spacing that superconductors had while cool even when it was heated up. This sounds line with that other research, though I can't find the article again, please correct me if you find otherwise.
Still likely to be rather fragile and temperamental to work with ... but this seems like it's possibly legit.
They were thinking of stretching at a macro scale (like bending a bar of stuff), rather than essentially "stretching" at the chemical scale which is what I understand they did here. Super cool!
> I think the “tension axis” is more likely to be fruitful in a different way, where we find some structure e.g. a crystalline formation that happens to hold atoms apart with just the right amount of tension. But this is all very speculative - the “tension axis” is just a random thought I had while reading the article!
They hit the nail on the head pretty well, I’d say!
Verification can be very easy for this particular phenomenon.
Lots of problems with the paper, they claim. It is not up to the standards of current SC research. One of them says Dias's work shows more merit than this.
Either way we should hear from people trying to replicate it soon.
Nevertheless I'm still quite skeptical.
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.
This seems way too good to be true. But hope that it actuaoly is true.
but a room-temperature superconductor would certainly lower the operating costs of all of the prototype fusion reactors that currently exist.
I guess this will be replicated/not pretty soon then.
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.
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.
You just need PbO, PbSO4, Cu, and P powders.
not that i think it matters that much. the paper doesn’t indicate that synthesis is a particularly sensitive step.
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.
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.
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.
The claims in this case are very simple to understand and very consistent with superconductivity, demonstrated on a macro scale at normal pressures and temperatures, there's video of the phenomena that doesn't make sense absent superconductivity, and most importantly: the method to produce the material is very simple, it is not going to be difficult at all for labs around the world to replicate this, and as other commenters have pointed out a lot of YouTubers are going to be able to replicate this.
So basically, this result could be fake, but it would need to be entirely faked results, faked video footage/photos, and it would be discovered very, very quickly because this is so easy to replicate. If it's true, people will have replicated this within a couple of weeks, which would be mostly sourcing materials. It will take longer than that for replications to publish (probably shorter for YouTubers), but this isn't going to be a situation where two years later we find out it's a fraud - we will know within a maximum of a couple of months that YouTubers can or can't replicate these results, and within a year whether a lab can or can't.
I wonder how much it would cost to try and replicate this, in materials, labor costs, and vacuum furnace time/costs. My naive guess is that that labs in general aren't just going to drop everything to try an replicate every instance of someone declaring they've discovered room temperature superconductivity. Seems more like a "there's a lull in paying work, so hey, why don't some of you junior technicians try this out" thing? Anyone have insight into this? I suppose a university lab might have more leeway here to try out spur of the moment experiments? Maybe this is a "I'm personally interested in this and I'll work in the evenings to test it out, instead of on company/university time"?
The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the superconductivity. Probably because it is only a thin film, the material could only support about 250 mA at 25°C before losing superconductivity. So even if the paper is correct, it might turn out to be challenging to get to higher currents. Or maybe not and one could just roll up a wide thin film and have as much amps as one likes.
EDIT: I misread the thin film thing, they also produced a thin film but primarily they describe the material testes as follows without any dimensions I could immediatly spot.
After the reaction, a dark gray ingot was obtained reproducibly and then made into the shape of thin cuboids for electrical measurements [...]
And even at 250mA, there'd be tons of different usecases for a superconductor.
I have only met a few physicists who don't write papers in latex. They are all 65+ and generally work with younger scientists/grad students who prepare the paper in latex for final drafts and submissions.
No less than Donald Knuth in fact
This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously:
- re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution.
- re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with:
> There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…
Sometimes you have to collaborate outside of physics!
He did not know LaTeX. Most of his papers probably were in LaTeX, as his students knew it. But I remember multiple papers he "authored" in Word, because that's what the student preferred.
I was in a top 10 school (in physics and engineering), and I can assert that the fraction of physics faculty who did not know TeX/LaTeX was at least a quarter, and could be as high as 50%.
All the major physics journals would accept Word submissions.
It's not at all unusual.
Today, Word is much more capable as a scientist's tool.
I've done professional typesetting and cataloging with QuarkXPress and InDesign both and it was extremely fast, that's for professional high quality publishing. .doc and .md is fine for information first publishing.
Latex is not simple and is in my opinion just a big nerd snipe, its the intrusive thought of layout software, for humanities sake we'd be better off with simpler tools like markdown + math notation and if latex had been never invented.
Or would you rather have me google a GUI that lets me "quickly rename" and download a few programs that have this capability? Or do a few hundred files by hand?
Command line is... fine for doing this occasionally, but it's hardly "quick" or usable for this, I'm saying that as an advanced commandline user. You're just using the tool that you already have and know, and it happens to be the system shell. It doesn't have to be.
(another question is that classic file management at the scale where a sophisticated tool is needed is mostly automated nowadays, and yes there's scripting as well)
I would prefer not to have gatekeeping either way, both "It was written using Word, it must be fake" and "Latex should never have been invented."
There are big geek communities that lead newbies astray by recommending it, it's a nerd snipe that wastes a lot of brain cycles better used elsewhere. It's only little b bad, not big B bad.
I am saying it's a poor tool, a waste of time and an evolutionary dead end, people are allowed to fetishize poor tools, efficiency, simplicity and legibility are very poor in latex world with a high learning curve for a task that is at best tertiary to the task of doing real research, it's a tool that promotes rabbit trails, bike shedding and procrastination.
And the small amount of research that has looked into this has apparently born this out in at least some small degree. It's not a hot take if it's got backing.
To your main point, no, theoretical physics paper are almost all written in latex. I can't recall word-written theory paper. Experimental papers are sometimes word, but pretty rarely. You can try randomly sample papers from cond-mat arxiv to verify it.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
A couple of posts about how poor that paper was:
• https://lemire.me/blog/2015/01/14/knauff-and-nejasmic-recomm...
Update: "yes", from the paper: "The Josephson-like phenomenon for the under-damped junction of superconductor-normal metal-superconductor(21, 22) or Inter-grain coupled superconductors(23) and the thermoelectric effect(24-26) of the inter- or intra-grain network were also observed."
For what it's worth, superconductors have a shared budget[1] of (magnetic field, temperature, current). At 25°C, the material is near its critical temperature, so its current-carrying capacity is necessarily diminished. At a lower temperature, the film should be able to carry more current.
That said, 250mA is plenty of current if you're interested in making a superconducting CPU.
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/scbc2.html
edit after reading the paper: they claim an extraordinarily high critical temperature of ~126°C. You can see the temperature dependence in Figure 1e; they're much further from the critical temperature than I expected, and at room temperature, a little cooling appears to go a long way. I'm eager to see an attempt to reproduce this result. That said, the material is essentially a 2d molecule -- we've been hyped on graphene for decades, and have yet to see it integrated into a scalable process.
What's more interesting is flexibility. Current ceramic liquid-nitrogen-cooled superconductors are not flexible at all; they are brittle. This can be fine for a transmission line, but makes things hard for various coils.
Ummm am I the only one who finds this line hilarious?
most humble hackernews commenter
Perhaps MRIs will become ubiquitous and cheap, something we all get every time we go to the doctor?
Superconduction also has some weird magnetic properties I believe, so there could be benefits regarding maglev transport.
And finally and most basically, the movement of electrical energy across potentially large distances with zero loss would be a great thing.
Having said that there is a resurgence of interest in low-field MRI lately, primarily marketed for use in developing nations and for combination machines that integrate radiation therapy. From what I've heard from diagnostic radiologists, the low-field MRI scanners seem to be of limited diagnostic value on their own.
Anyway that's just my thought that the best/first applications here may not be about generating magnetic fields.
MRI machines can be made a lot simpler as you no longer need to use liquid nitrogen to cool the superconductors. MRI machines could end up being small and cheap.
Perfectly efficient electromagnets make a lot of problems in fusion reactors simpler, I'm not sure that room temperature superconductors make fusion reactors instantly viable but it's a big step and would reduce the energy requirements for a fusion bottle by a lot.
Basically anything involving electromagnets becomes a lot more efficient. Motors can be made smaller, generators can be made much more efficient for the weight, maglev trains can require very little power to hover. It has effects on almost every industrial process as it fundamentally changes the weight and energy efficiency of anything involving electromagnets.
One neat things would be surgical robots that can work as an MRI while also levitating a small blade in a 3D space. Challenging for sure but when you can replace complicated liquid-nitrogen cooled coils with an array of simple passive coils a lot of options open up.
Superconductors can also be used for power storage, and at room temperature that becomes a lot more viable.
Here's this big wikipedia page on applications of superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_...
Also on the less useful side, rail guns.
Maybe it’s competitive with batteries if you don’t need any cooling?
But even if not it could be great for a capacitor alternative or stationary storage.
Actually, not a lot. The are some very compelling uses of them for storing energy, but they are much more relevant for distribution grid stability and control than for raw energy storage.
There are people here are pushing some really non-compelling use cases (like long distance power distribution), but there are plenty of transformative ones.
(But the thing is that this one on the paper is much less useful than it could be. There is still some work on understanding why and fixing it.)
- They enable low cost, continuous, passively-stable magnetic levitation. Superconductors could replace ball bearings in many applications.
- They enable permanent magnets that are far stronger than any we make from conventional magnetic materials. For example, motors tend to run at high speed and low torque, so as to minimize heat generated from current in the copper windings. Superconducting direct-drive motors could allow for ultra-high-torque actuators without any need for gearing, and with minimal heat generation or losses. So superconducting electromagnets could replace everything from electric motors to hydraulic pistons to simple springs.
- Superconductors allow for very sensitive antennas and magnetic field sensors, allowing for near-field detection of very small signals (such as from neurons firing in the brain). There is a lot of impressive technology that only exists inside research labs where a generous supply of cryogenic liquids are always on hand. Those could make their way into mass-market products.
That's just a very short list.
In other words, "reversibility", but you can actually pool the useless results together, you don't need to separate them later. Or so I read somewhere...
That's technically fine, as long as you have an infinite supply of stably initialized bits onto which to copy your result. Initializing those bits is going to be non-reversible in some way.
It's an important, exciting step but it's very far from world-changing at this stage. Or if it is in a limited way. The first transistors were clunky affairs, of limited usefulness, world changing for ship-to-shore communication in the military. But then people discovered how to make them with deposition instead of factories, and they got smaller and faster, and they really did change the world. We're in the "clunky transistor" period.
Exactly. But that clunky transistor was in fact world-changing. It just took a while for the changes to take place but the stage was set when that first device showed that it could be done at all.
This is an unlisted video of the LK-99 film (purportedly)
But it's also a surprise for theoreticians, and I guess the mechanism is very prone to improvement.
Fairly common, especially in life sciences, and I suspect chemistry and materials science.
Added in edit: This doesn’t make the result any more or less credible; for that, the true test is independent replication of both the synthesis as well as the experimental measurements. But the fact that the two authors published two papers with different groups is orthogonal to whether the result is real / an experimental error / fraud. I so hope its true - but..lets wait for replication and validation by other qualified experts :)
"The Additional experimental results and discussions on LK-99 will be published immediately in the next paper, including an interesting controllable levitation phenomenon and the coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity, theoretical calculation, etc."
Manifold Markets is hovering around 30% with 225 traders that it is replicated before 2025.
https://manifold.markets/Mira/will-the-first-roomtemperature...
There's a few more similar questions on their news dashboard: https://manifold.markets/home?tab=superconductor%3F
The one you linked is about retraction, not replication. Interestingly, they're both near 25%, which seems kinda contradictory. The retraction one has a deadline of Jan 1, 2024, but the replication one is Jan 1, 2025.
There's also this other retraction one with a later deadline of Jan 1, 2025: https://manifold.markets/jack/will-the-first-roomtemperature...
So the market leans toward the idea that it won't be replicated, and it will be retracted in 2024 (or in 2023 but less likely).
Superconducting quantum computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_comput...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
Given there have been already around 10-20 claims of room-temperature superconductivity in the past which turned out to be wrong or useless, bayesian reason would imply that this has a maximum of 10% probability that it is true.
If it is real though, this is a massive step up for humanity. The stuff of science fiction.
If a material with the properties described actually exists, this paper is exactly the kind of announcement and evidence we'd want for it.
I think I cross-pollinated this thread with another where someone was asking “if this is true why isn't it on the front pages”. The extraordinary evidence I'd want before it hits the front pages and TV talk shows is other scientific/engineering groups managing to reproduce the findings, or at least showing a significant improvement over previous discoveries (there could be a mistake that means the result isn't that big a thing while still leaving room for it to be a significant finding).
Yep. But that doesn't stop me being sceptical of such a jump in success (from tens of K below room to tens+ above at ambient pressure) which is where this sub-that started.
As already stated ("I think I cross-pollinated this thread with..." in the post you replied to) I confused things by mixing replies to different posts in the same place.
Also this is a preprint so clearly it's not vetted by others yet.
This is unusual, superconductivity is a low temperature phenomenon. Recently though, other researches have claimed room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, but low temperatures.
"You can't run across this bridge without falling? Here, I'll have an elephant bounce up and down on one end, that'll make it easier!"
But there will likely be very many bogus preprints for each true extraordinary finding.
Therefore most things showing up like this are untrue.
You'll never make all doubt go away on a new extraordinary discovery, mainly because most claims of an extraordinary discovery turn out to be mistakes (like the FTL neutrino thing a while ago that turned out to be a wiring fault that caused a minute timing error) or occasionally fabrications.
A quiet publication of “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please try reproduce or tell us what you think we've misinterpreted” is the way it should go. Unfortunately too subtle a release would be at risk of being ignored, and on the other side you get the mad public press and massive recriminations when it turns out a mistake was made and the finding is not reproducible (like the cold fusion thing I remember from the late 80s).
High temperature superconductors are not likely to be useful as powerful magnets, but they can be useful for almost everything else.
If this is comparable to the development of the transistor, what are the analogous vacuum tubes that I am living with today?
For all of the big use cases people mostly talk about when referring to room temperature superconductivity, like very cheap and easy MRIs, lower losses in power grid transmission, more powerful motors, cheaper and easier nuclear fusion (potentially necessary for commercial viability), this material as-is won't be suitable because it can't deal with that much current. We would need to explore this new family of materials and try to find one that maintains the superconductivity but significantly increases critical current and critical Tesla.
That said, this material could be genuinely revolutionary for consumer electronics and computation. Increasing computational energy efficiency on the chip level is going to be really valuable, but it's also probably going to take a long time to make it into actual electronics. Although, it is encouraging that the process for making this is similar to processes that are already used widely in industry, even in semiconductors specifically.
>"In 2008, Gozar et al. reported hightemperature interface superconductivity between metallic and insulating copper oxides(39). The thinner the layer, the greater the stress-inducing effect, the greater the strain, which seems to be the higher the superconducting transition temperature. Therefore, we argue that the stress caused by temperature and pressure brings a minute structural distortion and strain, which create an electronic state for superconductivity."
Anyway, very interesting paper!
This is a Nobel prize if true. This is literally a world changing, history defining moment if true.
Like "renewable energy storage solved" scale of revolutionary.
So I'm very skeptical right now.
It seems to me the hype is along the lines of 'free electricity', 'levitating trains', 'magnetic space launches', 'climate change solved', etc, etc, but these seem either wrong or unrealistic to me.
Electricity transmission efficiency can improve a little, for some routes. Same for electric motors, but they're already 95%+ efficient in some cases.
Maybe it would be useful for energy storage, maybe not - depends on capabilities and especially cost.
Might be useful for levitating trains if suitable, but even then this would be a relatively minor part of any overall design.
I can see a lot of applications/possibilities in research, and in sensors, and maybe it enables some things that aren't currently possible, but what?.
It's undeniably neat and interesting, but it seems over-hyped; maybe someone can enlighten me? Is there a 'killer app'?
Put it in your battery anode and you can charge your car in a few seconds.
Computers won't need cooling and can be way smaller. Quantum computing becomes more practical. AGI is more likely.
Huge implications for Fusion, which then means we can start pulling CO2 from the air since we'll have more power than we need...
'good news' doesn't begin to cover it :)
http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=A...
However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn.
But imagine if it’s true.
Ejecting the magnetic field (the Meissner effect) is a way better sign.
I find it very hard to believe that this could be true, but at least they're measuring the right things.
All judgement withheld until we get a few more labs chiming in with their results though.
I suppose that would be a useful material even if it couldn't be used for high current applications.
Hell of a way to end a paper.
Bronze age
Iron age
LK-99 (®) age
Great for energy transmission (though you can't put too much current, superconductivity breaks down under strong fields).
Great for fast circuits, such as CPUs, that don't waste energy just transmitting data.
Great for storing energy (in principle) by just making a loop and let current flow indefinitely.
Related, great for building powerful magnets (that are just such a loop) without wasting too much energy. Applications: MRI machines (they already use superconductors but are bulky due to the need for cooling) and other powerful magnets: LHC/particle accelerators, Tokamaks/plasma control/fusion. But also improved motors and generators.
Nice for levitating stuff since they levitate above magnets "for free" (due to their interaction with electrical fields, they reject magnetic fields). Possible applications for maglev (trains, etc), magnetic bearings, etc.
And possibly a lot of new applications opened up if you remove the need for cooling (Faraday cages?).
Of course, it all depends on how much current and temperature it can handle. But if this is real, just having one material is game-changing, and it will surely be improved upon by looking for similar properties in other materials. This one contains lead, which is a non-starter for a lot of applications due to its toxicity.
Someone else wrote a few use-cases in that other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36866686
We've been using cadmium-based batteries for ages despite Cadmium being even more toxic than lead, and are still using lead batteries in ICE cars AFAIK. Lead toxicity isn't really a problem unless you burn it, deliver water through it or you put it on paint that end up in kids' mouth…
Lead batteries for cars are a bit special, as the whole supply chain goes both ways for recycling, while batteries are rather self-contained and not usually exposed to harsh environments.
Though I suspect you are right in the end, as it's a matter of judging the risk vs reward, I wouldn't be surprised if other materials with a similar structure end up performing similarly.
Pb is also quite hard to use in integrated circuits, as far as I know. I am no material scientist, but it could be due to its low melting point or tendency to contaminate other metals.
The definition of an insulator is a material that holds (up to some amount of) voltage without electrical currents appearing.
Your example needs two wires. And the wires themselves don't have any voltage. All of the voltage is between them, and is only there because they are insulated from each other.
You are conflating 'insulated' and 'insulator'.
This doesn't mean there is no resistance in the wires that move electricity to your house, because superconductors only work when cooled to unpractically low temperatures, meaning they can only be used for special things like the magnets in MRI machines and fusion reactors.
That is, until now. This paper reports on a material that remains a superconductor at 127C.
To put this in further context, RTP superconductors mean compact, low-power MRIs and a massive shrinking, simplification and superpowering of magnetic-confinement fusion and ion propulsion designs. It blows apart chip designers' thermal constraints and opens up entire classes of energy-storage chemistries.
If this is real, it will be the defining discovery of our lifetimes.
though worth remembering we still don't know how to stabilise plasma or sensibly generate electricity from it.
> It blows apart chip designers' thermal constraints
really? much of the heat in chips comes from the /connections/ between transistors etc?
Superconducting magnets become cheap and widely available which allows for maglev trains at massive scale. Costs for the LHC and similar experiments would drop dramatically. MRIs would only require air conditioning, if that; Modern cell phones are sufficient to compute tomography. Magnetic confinement fusion also becomes cheaper and easier. Electric cars could use superconducting motor magnets allowing for even greater power to weight ratios and efficiency.
Just a few things off the top of my non-mechanical-engineer head.
Undersea cables are a pie in the sky; current high-load cables in urban an industrial areas could be made much smaller, simpler, and lossless.
I wonder if transformers, currently huge and expensive, could be made better with this, too; at least the ohmic losses could be removed, and thus a lot of need for cooling, and the fire hazards.
Not really, when the sun is up over the Pacific ocean, there's not that much sun over land. Maybe a global grid happens anyway, but cabling losses aren't the only source of cost, so I'd put my money on more localized improvements.
Better interconnection between and within local grids (maybe a viable Tres Amigas interconnection, but even just better connections between sections of the major grids would help with grid management. Improvements in motors, MRIs, magnetic bearings, transformers, etc.
[edit: typo]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
I'm not an expert, and everything that follows comes from a quick reading of this Wikipedia article.
It seems like (counter-intuitively) refrigeration isn't a significant cost compared to all the other stuff that's necessary. So at first glance it seems like high-temperature superconductors might not make a big difference.
However, that Wikipedia article does say this:
> The critical temperature of a superconductor also has a strong correlation with the critical current. A substance with a high critical temperature will also have a high critical current. This higher critical current will raise the energy storage exponentially. This will massively increase the use of a SMES system.
Right now, superconducting energy storage has a lot of advantages, but it doesn't have very good energy density (by mass). Not even a tenth of what lithium-ion batteries have. I assume you couldn't power a car with it. But it has some compelling advantages in other areas. It has unlimited charge/discharge cycles. It has zero self-discharge. It has unlimited (in theory) power density, so you could charge or discharge it arbitrarily fast.
Depending on what the energy density ends up being, it might suddenly become way more useful. It would have to be a gigantic leap in energy density, though.
Also, not needing refrigeration could potentially open up smaller scale applications. Maybe you could have a residential superconductor storage system for your solar panels. (Although I don't know about its safety, so maybe not.)
All this assumes the cost to build it is reasonable compared to other alternatives, that the discovery is real, etc.
I would say that electronic computers would take take the first spot for me, but I don't deny that room-temperature superconductors would be pretty close to the top.
As a singular discovery goes, it’s hard to think of something that tops this. Of course, even if this is true, bringing it to market in a practical way will probably look a lot more like the invention of electronic computers.
In short, you are probably right, with the sibling commenting on (BJT) transistors.
So that wouldn't be in the last 100 years.
However unlike computers, if this idea works, it will get productized quickly.
We'd just make a global energy grid, and the sunny side powers the dark side.
Joking aside, besides power transmission, what other obvious things can this tech be used for?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36867709
Needless to say, this would be game-changing. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence etc, let's be cautiously optimistic here.
Ideally, this could be useful for the hottest paths: clock tree, high-speed buses, as well as the power supplies.
There are a few hurdles though: high-speed voltage changes create changing currents, which creates variable magnetic fields, which IIRC may be a problem depending on the superconductor's characteristics. Processors also work at low voltages, which means that they need huge currents. Both magnetic fields and large current (as well as high temperatures) can break down superconductivity. So it's challenging, but probably doable.
There are also superconducting structures that could replace transistors, see applications of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
I don’t think you’re right, for the record.
OTOH, I am also not sure what we as a species can do in the next 5 years that actually will matter.
But yes, for serious uses, this will be a big deal if it works out and can be made into a flexible cable. And I’m sure people will work on a less-toxic version.
This would enable really long distance electrical transmission, which solves the whole intermittency issue with solar energy.
Superconductivity will for sure enable some innovations and could change how we are building power grids, but I don't see it changing the world to the same extent.
The hard problem solved by satellites is getting the satellite in orbit and getting it to stay there.
Humanity already could send radio waves across the planet. Emitter and receiver is not the hard problem.
A 1000-qubit QC can't break a RSA-2048 key, let alone a lot of other interesting tasks. Quantum computers aren't magical things that provide exponential speedups on absolutely everything; they can only provide exponential speedups on some algorithms, and those algorithms generally require linear numbers of qubits to the problem size, so 1000 qubits is greatly limiting to problem size.
Neither any classical computer can. We don't even have enough harddrive to store all quantum information in a 100 qubit QC, let alone 1000qubit. QC is limited to solve a subset of problems do not automatically equals to QC is useless comparing to classical ones. Also not able to invalidate the powerfulness of QC beyond 100 qubits.
Please note: this comment is an attempt at humor. Various people seem to have a difficult time discerning humor or sarcasm and choose to downvote. It is also possible (but unlikely) that I am not funny.
The PS was also very real as the grandparent gets buried under downvotes.
Still it'd be a prime new part of "living in the sci-fi future" for me.
It's absolutely a possibility in the space of this situation. However, any judgement, positive or negative, should be withheld until other labs and people claim to reproduce or not.
The past century has had a lot going on.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en?oq=WO202...
It's to protect the inventors while they license the technology.
If this works they'll be licensing the rights to use it to some massive companys... besides multiple Korean companies are already invested in it...
LK-99 would likely only be a first step... a brittle crystal doesn't make a great power line...
In the second paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037 ) on page 8 they write: "In the first region below red-arrow C (near 60°C), equivalent to region F in the inset of Fig. 5, the resistivity with noise signals can be regarded as zero." I can only see from the plotted curve that the resistivity below 60°C is below about 5·10^-4 Ω·cm. Compare that to the resistivity of silver, which is 1.59·10^-6 Ω·cm.
It doesn't get better if you test the electric field criterion. On page 11 of the second paper you can see in Fig 6a that they measured a voltage of about 2mV in the "superconducting" state, and the voltage only drops off when the current approaches 0. In the first paper on page 19 they write that they used pogo probes with a distance of 1.2mm. So the electric field they measured is about 17mV/cm. That is a lot higher than the superconductor criterion of 1µV/cm, let alone 0.1µV/cm. Even if they mistakenly used mV instead of µV in their diagram, a factor of 17 would still need a good explanation.
So either a complete fake or an interesting effect but not superconductivity.
What's the queue of things we'd like to do with a room temperature superconductor, and how might they affect my life?
[I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious]
Hard to put it into words, but there's something that just doesn't feel right--I'd be very skeptical of these results.
Like the Schon scandal comes to mind. Super easily non-reproducible but somehow the dude was adamant that it was legit and everyone ate it up.
I guess we wait for other attempts at reproducing this.
My second thought, how does it respond to magnetic fields?
But as a newly self-proclaimed expert on superconductors as well, yeah this would probably help MRIs. My understanding is that the reason for superconductors in MRIs is so that the wires doing the electricity stuff don't interfere with the small electrical responses from the tissue it's measuring. Without resistance, you don't get magnetic fields around the wires or something.
Basically really high density batteries that work efficiently forever, zero friction bearings via levitation, zero resistance long haul energy transport, and an MRI you can probably run on household current.
Plus maximally efficient (not perfect efficiency just the best we could theoretically practically get) energy storage, transport, generation, and conversion back to motion.
"Important? Yes! Critical? Absolutely. I would go so far as to say that Superconducting Fiber alone makes our present economy possible."
Just imaging what the changes in our world would be if even half of what's possible comes true.
Just keep the Pierson's Puppeteers away. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777268
Also, I see a lot of people claiming superconductors could become household items. What are super conductors even made of? Are these materials accessible to normal people?
How is this better than this?
What is the relation are you suggesting?
I'll say, for "room temperature", that's certainly no room I'd want to be in.
Who knows though, maybe we'll be able to finally launch ships into space without rockets?
No company listed.
> We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.
If it is true, it would be a revolution for nearly every field. So I certainly hope I'm wrong!
That resistance turns the energy that is being transmitted through the conductor into heat, essentially wasting it for useful purposes unless you're running a hair dryer or oven.
For instance, one of the reasons why power plants have to be near the cities they serve, aside from practical logistics, is that if you send electricity over power lines, you lose some of that electricity to the resistant line drop, the voltage decreases over time, and ultimately you could lose all of your usable power to heat.
However, that changes when superconductors come into play. Many power plants already use them for short distances where the heat is high and the line drop is also high, but if you replaced every power line in America with superconducting lines a power plant in Florida could sell extra spare power to Alaska with no loss between the two plants. (This is in theory, it is still likely that there would be losses where the lines are split and connected, but that would still be far less than the greater than 100% voltage loss over 7,000 miles of traditional copper lines that you would expect.)
Room temperature superconductors would provide many benefits aside from power transmission as well. Electric vehicles would be more efficient with power coils made from them, allowing more of the electricity from the batteries to be turned directly into vehicle movement.
Cell phones would heat up less with superconducting wires, losing less of their battery power to heat and lasting longer.
Computers would run longer. CPUs would heat up less, requiring less cooling to operate at higher speeds and less power to run closer to the atomic limit of processing.
If it is proven that this works, then we may be very close to the system by which superconductivity works, and solving that may allow for hundreds or thousands of compounds exhibiting superconductivity to be made for myriad applications, allowing for us to live closer to the way we tend to while being a bit greener in the process.
Color me skeptical, with a hint of optimism.
But there doesn't seem to be any indication in the link that this has been published in a peer reviewed journal, or received kinds of community peer review, either.
Actually the opposite is the strange. I would be skeptical of any group the report something in media before publishing the results in a journal (or arxiv like this case).
This is not to say anything about this particular paper. I still have to read it eventually.
Second, you're literally saying you expect to read important things on mainstream press instead of scientific journals.
Science is based on replicability, and you just don’t go straight to mass media before at least other groups have had a chance to replicate your findings. Definitely not when it’s something this big. Or if you do, your institution will likely be incredibly pissed. I’d say that the more careful they are, the more slowly and by the book they proceed with this, the more, not less, likely it is that this is a real deal.
Welcome to the information age my friend! Where you can know things before the gatekeepers do.
What I was trying to say was more along the lines of, if this is legit, I’m surprised we weren’t first hearing about it in the mainstream media after a leak.
I’m absolutely not in favor of any more Pons & Fleischmann moments.
Fig. 1(d) cannot be correct either. At Tc ~ 400K the Meissner effect would displace a much stronger field than 10 Oe = 1 mT. I.e. the distinction between FC (field cooled) and ZFC (zero-field cooled) should not be that pronounced. It should look more like this [1].
In this case, however, the temperature dependency does not agree at all with the critical currents of Figs. 1(a) and (c).
Also, that ALL the values in Fig. 1(d) are negative is extremely unusual, but that could perhaps be argued with.
The data set in Fig. 4(b) is also a treat. It is VERY unusual when the heat capacity decreases again at high temperatures. This can happen at low temperatures, but not at high temperatures.
I am very familiar with the described experimental setup / the cryostat. There is no good reason why the authors did not measure at higher temperatures to show that the behavior is markedly different above Tc ~ 400K. For example, a temperature dependency of the resistance would have been absolutely necessary.
In general, the paper is very poorly written. The data is under-discussed, the explanations are sparse, and the work cited is, shall we say, sparse. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what the authors measured and claim to have seen.
My personal assumption is that the authors measured an insulator, so no current flowed and therefore no voltage occurred (4-point measurement). Then it looks like a superconductor. But if you then turn up the current (i.e. the applied voltage), breakdowns may occur and a current begins to flow. That would explain the sharp increase.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthias-Graf-4/publica...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370037045/figure/fi...
[2]https://www.europhysicsnews.org/images/stories/hl/472/Guo.jp...
How easy was it to do that for Kuwaiti oil industry, and how long did it last?
When enough interests are aligned, equilibria stay pretty steady, exactly because there are several powerful interests.
That's a pretty high bar. Everyone has their own threshold of skepticism, but if NREL announced next week that they followed the recipe and it was superconducting at room temperature, I'd be willing to bet money on it being real.
I think that "reproduced at 100 labs" is near the level of reproduction at any university lab, maybe even as a part of students coursework. Which would actually be great, since we don't have trouble reproducing some other important electromagnetic and quantum phenomena, like light diffraction, at an ordinary university lab.
Realistically, once you get a handful of independent reproductions, the odds that something is an error or a fraud drop to basically nil.
- Look, I'm a bit busy right now
- Celsius
I still enjoyed the joke though.
At 127 celsius, you have a lot of margin even over the hottest temperatures on earth (which appear to be mostly recognized as 56.7 °C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o....
Would love 3rd party confirmation as well, of course.
Edit: Here's a video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k
It's unlisted as well but published back in January of 2023. I wonder what they are going to think with the influx of views on it, (43 views as of this post)
Is it just me or is it odd not seeing the normal condensation of the surrounding air due to a chilled superconductor like you get with a YBCO.
Some superconductors get destroyed by humidity, so it may be difficult to ship them.
If nobody can reproduce them, then they can send samples or travel the word making samples on site, or receive researches to train them.
The good part of publishing the recipe, is that other people can make small variations. If this is true, there is just now a big race to get a higher record temperature.
Researchers come to a conclusion and make a paper, this is exactly how it is done.
Others can try to replicate their results, the paper is very explicit with what they've done.
https://www.wowtv.co.kr/NewsCenter/News/Read?articleId=A2015...
Don't want to translate because it's a waste of time but they are using some crazy buzzwords to raise money for their unlisted stock.
Gems like how they extracted some miracle material from plant matter that exhibits "Quantum Energy Living Body" and it apparently has self-healing properties and emits UVA rays (I cannot translate how ludicrous this is, this is some biosteel cyberpunk 2077 shit)
What, exactly, are the "world changing" applications? Perhaps my imagination isn't up to the task of seeing this. What I see is a novelty for physics students to levitate magnets without the need for liquid nitrogen, and perhaps it will make some quantum computing designs more efficient (and therefore render PKI obsolete. yay?)
We don't know what we will know in the future, or else we would already know it.
You wouldn't happen to be in crypto currency would you?
Even this paper doesn't claim to have a particularly good superconductor as far as overall performance is concerned. It's not particularly close to the state of the art in critical field or current. But if it does turn out that their hypothesis claiming that the internal stress of the material allows it to bypass the current need for extremely high pressures / low temperatures, then perhaps there can be new materials developed that are better superconductors while still overcoming the current limitations presented by REBCOs and other leading superconductors. Also, that's not even mentioning that LK-99 has no particularly exotic materials. REBCOs rely on rare earth elements like Yttrium, but this just uses lead, copper, and phosphorus.
Superconducting computing is a big one - even if we stick to classical computers (i.e. not quantum computers), there are estimates that superconducting computers could be ~1000x more energy efficient than state-of-the-art semiconductor computers.
- Step 1: Prepare lanarkite, Pb2SO5, by mixing PbO and PbSO4 powders in a 1:1 molar ratio in an agate mortar with a pestle. Transfer the mixture to an alumina crucible and react it at 725 °C for 24 hours in a furnace. Pulverize the white product with the mortar.
- Step 2: Prepare copper phosphide, Cu3P, by mixing Cu and P powders in a 3:1 molar ratio. Transfer the mixture to a quartz tube and seal it under a vacuum of 10-5 Torr. React it at 550 °C for 48 hours in a furnace. Take out the dark gray ingot and pulverize it.
- Step 3: Mix lanarkite and copper phosphide powders in a 1:1 molar ratio in an agate mortar with a pestle. Transfer the mixture to a reaction tube and seal it under a vacuum of 10-5 Torr. React it at 925 °C for 10 hours in a furnace. Take out the dark gray ingot and shape it into thin cuboids for electrical measurements. Pulverize some of the ingot for other analyses.
These are the steps to synthesize the LK-99 material.