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Comment by Akronymus | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding it is superconductive up to that temp. So, superconductive at room temp and even further.

That makes me even more sceptical. In recent years confirmed discovery of superconducting materials have gone from working at best up to ~100K below room temperature to at best a few 10s of K below. To jump to a material that claims to exhibit superconductivity as far as >100K above room temperature, at ambient pressure too, is an extraordinary claim and so needs to be presented with extraordinary evidence.

I mean, the paper has experimental results and it should be easily reproducible by pretty much any lab. Do you think they should be hopping on CNN to give a public demonstration with the announcement?

If a material with the properties described actually exists, this paper is exactly the kind of announcement and evidence we'd want for it.

No, I agree with you that a quiet “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please reproduce or tell us if you find something we've misinterpreted”, rather than a public fanfare, is how a potential scientific breakthrough should be done IMO.

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).

But this is exactly the quiet please reproduce? It's a preprint posted to arxiv, with a very easy to follow material synthesis process in the supplemental materials section?

In fairness, the paper isn't exactly humble about its claims. But I appreciate their candor, and if they believe they've found a RTP superconductor and sufficiently verified it is a RTP superconductor, a bit of arrogance isn't unwarranted.

> But this is exactly

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.

I'm sure they believe their own results, but if they made a mistake, parading on TV would be a horrible mistake and a horrible embarrassment.

Also this is a preprint so clearly it's not vetted by others yet.

It's not out of line with previous the previous jump: the difference between the originally known superconductors and 'high temperature' superconductors was similarly large. If it is a novel mechanism allowing for it then we would not expect that the threshold would necessarily wind up close to room temperature (TBH, I this makes me think it is less likely to be fraud: I think a fraud would temper expectations by claiming it barely works at room temperature). I do agree it needs backing up, though, it could still be an error or more savvy/brazen fraud.

The critical temperature (Tc) >= 400 K or about 127 C, so apparently this material requires relatively high heat to reach superconductivity.

This is unusual, superconductivity is a low temperature phenomenon. Recently though, other researches have claimed room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, but low temperatures.

Uh no, I'm pretty confident they are just saying that whatever the Tc is, it's at least 127°C. I don't think they're redefining Tc to mean that it superconducts above that temperature. That would be... interesting.

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