Unconfirmed video showing potential LK-99 sample exhibiting the Meissner effect
twitter.com
twitter.com
The levitation with ordinary diamagnets such as pyrolytic carbon requires an array of magnets to create a concave pocket in the field, otherwise the floating sample will "slide off" and fall. Monolithic magnets produce convex fields.
Some people elsewhere also commented that this could be a video of an ordinary high-temperature superconductor, but I doubt it. Such a tiny spec would warm up to room temperature very quickly. I've experimented with broken and shattered fragments of YBCO and it wasn't possible to make small pieces hover like this, they'd warm up too quickly. Also, they were always frosty looking. To make them look black you'd have to do it in a perfectly dry atmosphere, which is a non-trivial setup.
> High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc or HTS) are defined as materials that behave as superconductors at temperatures above 77 K (−196.2 °C; −321.1 °F), the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures, close to absolute zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...
The content and the structure of the comment are both "high-quality" and useful, but at the same time they are of a very specific type of "quality" (the school essay format) that clearly rings ChatGPT-like.
Does HN have an official stance on AI-written comments?
Uh? No it does not.
> Either way, you didn’t need to post this.
Who made you the arbiter of that?
The comment made very good points. It explained how counter intuitive these particular technical terms are, explained the history behind this, and generalised this phenomenon to things some us might have more experience with.
I want to read more of that kind of comment not less.
The "However, ..." section at the end is a very common trope for ChatGTP to put some qualifications on what it just said and backpedal a bit. That is the only part that I feel might be confused for ChatGPT.
Nah, it'll stick around and you'll just have people talking about very high temperature superconductors.
This is very well done if faked (dated up the top left), so it would be another first if it was a real fake. That would also be exciting.
The strange things are...
No one else can find it yet.
It's not a phone video off a monitor, it's an actual video, time stamped and watermarked. Poster says Twitter is lowing the quality. It's also a strange aspect ratio and position for lab video (that watermarks a date).
It's watermarked with a unknown watermark.
Twitter account is brand new.
e: Looked it up, they got fined a few million a year ago so now US users cannot bet
How can you tell though? There are magnets which look like a single thing, but the polarity switches on the same side multiple times (sorry, I don't know what they're actually called).
https://www.magnet-sdm.com/2019/11/21/programmable-magnetize...
That being said, I highly doubt they are using one in this video.
Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/
One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.
Another by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
Compared to regular comments on say youtube, these kinda give a time element to the comments, when they should appear in the video playback
I think they're insanely distracting, and they only get worse the better I get at understanding them. But then again, people disagree on whether you should talk during movies, too. If it's a bad movie, sometimes the user commentary is better.
https://twitter.com/vasuttomas0423/status/168642344021411840...
In this day and age, practically everyone has a potato in their pocket. Almost noone has a professional video camera with requisite lens assembly costing at least several grand total in their pocket (not that one would fit in there).
The best results I've had with small things are using the super zoom telephoto lenses like on samsung s22. I haven't seen a smartphone macro lens that takes decent photos of things yet (unless the subject is perfectly still). Perhaps the latest gen has found a way but in smartphone land you're mostly relying on software post processing since they capture so little light.
>The videos I have are undoubtedly clearer than this one. It seems that the video quality is getting compromised when uploading it to Twitter.
https://twitter.com/VasutTomas0423/status/168658616920589926...
It doesn't have to be LK99. It'll be one of the other variants that we discover.
Others with more knowledge materials production please add more to this... but it's certainly encouraging there's no rare earth metals or anything radioactive as a component!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Ti...
(Rare earths are neither particularly rare nor particularly toxic. They do seem to have the annoying property that there aren’t that many large rare earth mines.)
Even if LK99 may not, one of the materials with similar properties they will create may be easy to produce and robust to use.
One theoretical paper suggests that the copper doping has two ways of occurring in the crystal structure, and that the more energetically favoured one is not the desired configuration. It may be very challenging to produce the desired crystal structure in bulk, and then it might not be stable over long time periods.
With most superconductors, they start to lose their benefits close to their critical temperature. So this material may not be able to support strong magnetic fields or high currents.
I expect thin-film applications to happen first. It's easy to control, easy to make large contiguous surfaces, and very useful for all sorts of things. Thin motherboards, LCD/OLED display panels, flat antennas, etc, etc...
Imagine a day when every medium-sized research lab has direct access to the quantum-accurate SI volt and nobody needs to send their voltmeters out for calibration anymore (although I don't know how hard would it take to make a microchip with 10,000+ Josephson junctions out of it...)
[0] https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/quantum-voltage-proje...
[1] https://www.nist.gov/sri/standard-reference-instruments/sri-...
Of course, you could fake it for a video by buying a special disc magnet with a multipolar magnetization pattern, but magnets like that are pretty hard to find.
Though, so far, room temperature superconductors have been even harder.
NB: This may be painfully obvious from the figures.
edit: also the origin story sounds strange, unless translated badly "A fellow researcher of mine said he received this video from another colleague on Telegram."
You underestimate how many people simply don't feel the need (or explicitly don't want) to have their name attached to their work.
You aren't aware of the numerous people who have stayed under the radar in the process of every stage of development that has ever happened.
Like, roll back to 90s and tell me that Lithium-Ion batteries would be powering all my power tools today and be on-par or better then corded counterparts?
Material properties are an issue to consider. If they've been working for 25 years "knowing" this product is there, I'd be a little conservative about how much of the sky I'd let my pie consume.
Even if synthesis is perfected, it's a ceramic. It may end up being a superconductor along only one axis. That's not a recipe for ductile feedstock.
Seen that for everything from 3D printing and AI to fusion and superconductors.
That's extremely funny, thank you :)
It also makes a very valid point about human nature: we are resistant to acceptance of news that will change our worldview to the point that when presented with evidence of something new our first reaction seems to be to go into denial.
I went from feeling this had a 5% probability of being true to 35% or so in the past few days. In the end that belief is going to reach 0.00001% or 99.99999%; but until it settles in one of those places it's going to drift like it's being blown by the wind.
And when it's real-- do we get something useful from it in 5 years or never? It's taken us decades to get significant high temperature superconductor applications.
In the end, there's so much uncertainty, and until it all settles out we can either be ambivalent or cheer for a side.
There is no guarantee that "if this is real" that there's a workable path to current densities and manufacturing ease that leads to commercialization-- ever.
And if there's a path, it's difficult to predict how long following that path will take.
YBCO dates to 1986 and requires much less of a cooling installation than the superconductors that are in use today. We are just reaching commercial use in the past few years...
Also for things that do pan out, they sometimes comes with unforeseen negative consequences.*
As a result, it’s hard to get excited about ”great new thing” these days.
* e.g. the internet; there was so much optimism over it in the 90s … no one foresaw its use to track and manipulate the public on a massive scale, the damage to mental health social media has afflicted, … etc.
I just approach “next big thing” with caution these days. It will either go nowhere or actually work but will have unforeseen fallout that we have to deal with / live with.
(neither of those was me, for clarity)
you gain nothing bashing new tech that doesn't pan out
If it doesn't matter either way, why be pessimistic - especially if you're a tech enthusiast - as most people on HackerNews ought to be.
I would be wasting attention on it. I kind of wish that the front page isn’t flooded with so much speculative news - when it reaches a certain level it becomes noise drowning out the signal. Tell me when you have definitive results.
Meanwhile my 50+ year old inherited drills and saws work flawlessly.
None of this battery shit is sustainable in any sort of way when the batteries last 3-5 years. You can be sure you won’t be handing any of those tools down.
But it sounds like standardization of the battery packs would fix a lot of your issues.
Rather than standardised boxes, I'd settle for manufacturers just using accessible screws to hold the battery together.
18650s are the absolute perfect example of this. Great little batteries.. for a few months.
Yes, it could be a very long path to mass manufacturing, if it ever happens, but it is far to early to dismiss the potential of this straight up.
The idea that you can determine those limits from a short video of an unrefined specimen of the first-ever synthesized bit of a brand-new material is just silly.
It's not possible for anyone to know yet whether this advancement, if real, will result in "power lines from Alaska to New York" at this time, in either direction.
@dang might be a good idea to replace the link
So the "source" is someone asking if anyone knows the source. This video could easily be a hoax.
First, one cannot measure superconductivity with an ordinary ohmmeter. Electrodes, wires and the ohmmeter itself are resistive, the meter can never show zero ohms. So you can't just look at the screen read-out and say there's superconductivity, you need to set an experiment up to do it manually, with a current source and a voltmeter to measure the IV curve across the material [1]. Even then, the voltmeter will never show "zero" volt because of noise, such as thermocouple effect, triboelectric effect, or electromagnetic interference - which need to be minimized during the experiment and removed during post-processing. There are also the problems of sample preparation and purity as others have noted.
[1] It's basically the same 4-wire Kelvin sensing used by all milli-ohmmeters. But to characterize superconductivity, you need to do even better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing
Like, is it that difficult to try to get a decent video of something that is life changing?
http://farside.link/twitter.com/zebulgar/status/168649851722...
Edit: Is it possible to replicate the structure of this material using carbon nano-tubing? Someone mentioned packing ceramic like materials into silver tubes as a means of making cables; can that be done with carbon nano-tubing?
The real revolution with something like this is in IC design (computers & Sensors) and maybe Transformer/Inductor/Coil design. Nobody is realistically expecting to roll out hoverboards or HVDC cables with this crystal.
(If this is real, I would expect other related materials that don’t contain lead to be found.)