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Comment by Escapado | Hacker News Reader

This whole saga is so exciting to watch. Maybe someone with a background in material science and/or engineering can help me out with a question: _If_ LK-99 turns out to be a room temperature superconductor how likely do you think it will be that we figure out how to to mass produce it in sufficient quality and quantity so that it can in fact be used for all the exciting applications we have for rtscs? I mean it's one thing to create a lab sample at 10% yield the size of a thumbnail but another thing entirely to create super long cables or massive amounts of motor parts or large sheets of it for MRTs. Is it a matter of time? Or could some applications remain elusive because of other potentially undesirable properties of the material (brittleness, heterogeneity, you name it)?

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If its real, it's going to excite a metric fuckton of funding in hightc superconductors research.

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...

I would much rather have rare earth metals involved than lead.

(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.)

Similar ceramic or crystalline superconductors took a long time to convert into useful cables. One technique is to fill a hollow silver(!) tube with powder, and then press it flat to compress the grains so that they touch. It may be possible to re-use similar techniques as-is, but that's hard to predict.

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...

i think i need to buy more silver

Isn't it true we've only tested superconducting materials at very low temps? Perhaps their robustness falls tremendously when not hundreds of degrees in the negative

Have you got a source to read more about this? Why the choice of silver - because of its reduced reactivity vs other conductors?

If this room-temperature superconductivity result is real, I have high hopes on the improvements they can possibly bring to the field of electrical metrology. Many precision measurement instruments require superconductive Josephson junctions, such as reproducing the definition of the SI volt [0], or magnetic field measurements with SQUID. But these exotic devices only exist in top research labs due to extremely high maintenance cost, including cooling requirement.

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...

The 2V Josephson junction array chip (without the needed cryocoolers or support machinery) is $28,600 [1]. Full system is a bit under $300,000, without including installation, calibration, or training costs. They do still need calibration to ensure they're measuring the output voltage properly.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/sri/standard-reference-instruments/sri-...

Just make a standardized toner and allow printing it with a dryable liquid in a usefull Config?

Rather than this particular "magic" material, LK99, in the original paper(s), authors propose their theory on why this material is behaving the way it is. This is a totally new way for achieving superconductivity in room conditions. If it is confirmed to be true, scientist can try to create similar materials with similar lattice structures focusing on what's needed, rather than focusing on LK99.

Even if LK99 may not, one of the materials with similar properties they will create may be easy to produce and robust to use.

It's a great question. I don't think anyone has a certain answer but it's definitely a real risk. The quick example is graphene which has all kinds of interesting properties, but, as far as I can tell, no practical applications primarily due to production issues

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