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Comment by chaimanmeow | Hacker News Reader

credibility of LK99 claims is very very high. What are the medium term practical implications for all these potential applications?

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It seems more and more like it's credible, but that synthesis is going to prove to be the issue. All these repro attempts are having too much success for there to be nothing behind the team's claims.

Can you explain why -160c is a measure of success when the claim was room temperature? A super conductor functioning at -160c would make MRIs simpler, but it's not world changing.

because it's a very unexpected result, it shouldn't be levitating at room temperature and the random drop in resistance at certain temperatures doesn't make sense

Does anyone know what S.R. Hadden has been up to lately? A new high-temperature superconductor seems like the perfect cover story for a fraud scheme around room temperature superconductors.

I don't think -160C would change much since it would still need cryogenic cooling. Liquid nitrogen is the most common and cheapest cryogenic. YBCO is liquid nitrogen cooled and has the advantage that can make in large quantities and has high field strengths.

But if it was slightly warmer, over -153C, then it could use non-cryogenic refrigerants.

Credible? Their claim was “room-temperature superconductivity.”

It looks like they've at least discovered a novel high temperature (relatively speaking), low pressure superconductor. That does lend some credibility to the original claim, and perhaps reproduction of the result is trickier than originally thought.

There’s a Grand Canyon sized chasm between creating a “low pressure superconductor” and creating a room-temperature superconductor and, unfortunately, Evel Knievel wasn’t a co-author.

We also don't know its critical field strength. The original measurement from Korea was low. That could improve as they improve synthesis, but could be problem with the material. There are lots of high temperature superconductors that aren't useful; YBCO is important because of high field strength and liquid nitrogen coooling.

I'm sure there are lots of uses for low current room-temperature superconductor. But powerful magnets and long-distance power transmission require large currents and big magnetic fields.

Start shorting power companies.

upvoted for the latent pun

Hypothetically, if we did end up with a worldwide superconducting energy grid, this would smooth load, which I would expect would make generation cheaper (since we can get rid of the need for expensive peaker plants and/or stationary storage requirements to handle local demand spikes). This would therefore make power companies more profitable, no?

Probably depends on the power company.

The ones with a lot of coal plans would suffer; the ones with a bunch of solar/wind farms in prime locations that can dramatically expand capacity (think things like giant solar farms in the Australian outback) would benefit.

HVDC and HVAC transmission lines already only see single digit transmission losses over hundreds of miles

This has bigger implications in reducing wiring (and weight) costs in things like electric vehicles. Instead of fat finger diameter 20' copper cables, you could replace them with tooth floss.

> HVDC and HVAC transmission lines already only see single digit transmission losses over hundreds of miles

Quite a bit of the world is thousands of miles from sunlight at any particular time. Being able to power Northern Europe off solar farms in the Sahara has the potential to fix a number of challenges with green energy.

Morocco has been working on this plan for ages. Coast to coast (~3000 miles) in the US is much less than 9%. It's possible with current technology, just nobody has the inclination to execute right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

0 applications out of the door but huge leap for material science. And some of the best and brightest people will look for something deep there.

What do you mean? If it's only a superconductor below 110K, that's not nearly as significant.

Yes, that's what one team now says: that they have observed super conductivity and that this happens at a much lower temperature than the one claimed by the other team. But it is at ambient pressure and more importantly there are already multiple confirmations of the Meissner effect at room temperature. Besides that this experiment shows some really weird stuff happening at higher temperatures that needs to be explained.

So this race is far from run yet.

What confirmations?

Very informal "leaked" confirmations, but that is the current state:

https://twitter.com/elsa17z/status/1686763798294593536?s=20

increased geopolitical tension

That is an interesting observation and puts words to some thoughts that I've had: if it turns out that this is 'the real thing' and the patent holds up South Korea is suddenly a superpower.

That doesn't follow at all. Lead and copper aren't exclusive to South Korea. The authors get prestige and the owners of whatever patents are granted get some money.

Of course they aren't. But patent owners get to set the terms under which their patents are licensed. It's not like the record business where there is a fixed deal and if you use someone's lyrics you know up front what it is going to cost you. Someone might not even want to do business with you at all...

> But patent owners get to set the terms under which their patents are licensed

To private entities, sure. The US government can and will force you to grant them a license if necessary.

Yes, except that's the US government and the inventors here are in South Korea. I don't think the US would get away with declaring 'eminent domain' over something invented in a different country. They could choose to simply not honor the patent but that will open a massive can of worms, especially because a lot of this stuff depends on reciprocity: if your government doesn't honor our key patents, why should we do the reverse?

Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur make up the bulk of organic molecules and plenty of those are covered by world wide patents (drugs).

Depends. This feels a bit like the Wright Brothers patenting wing warping. It's possible that innovation will happen so quickly that the original patents become worthless.

Frankly there is also zero chance that the patents are respected by all parties (i.e. China), regardless.

Yes, that is a definite possibility.

IP laws--should any even apply--won't prevent any state from using this material should the claims be proven true.

Of course it won't. But then I predict that there will be a massive impact on IP laws as a construct. Because this is the one that counts, if they don't work here they're doomed.

I don't think you can patent a material, just the methods you use to produce it. And if this is the real thing, there are probably dramatically more efficient ways to produce than this first step.

I don't think you should be able to, but there is this story that I read a while ago that makes it seem like you can:

https://www.nature.com/articles/35003008

If LK-99 turns out be a legit room temp superconductor I can't see traditional patent/IP rules applying to it. The value to our species to too high for a technology like that to be encumbered. I would think a very large lump sum payment to the patent holders would be sufficient to cover everyone's interest.

Otherwise I fully expect every government in the world to simply ignore the patent and allow public/private use -- effectively invalidating the patent.

There is existing precedent for this type of action: the US government seizing wireless patents during WW1 or the Indian government invalidating international patents on medication for the purpose of federal manufacturing.

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