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Comment by distortionfield | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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