However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn.
But imagine if it’s true.
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?
Still it'd be a prime new part of "living in the sci-fi future" for me.
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.
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 past century has had a lot going on.
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.
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.
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.
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.