I'm still unclear. Why is the test limit 110K? If this is supposed to be usable at ambient temperature then this seems like not a useful finding. Is it just some artifact of how superconductivity is measured?
Testing a sample at superconductivity-friendly temperatures helps figure out whether there's something to investigate here, since most materials do not superconduct at any useful temperature.
The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.
- It's still a huge deal if the manufacturing is as easy as it appears to be, even if most of the replication attempts aren't getting _quite_ the right thing. It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.
Is it, though? I mean it's hilarious sure but if we were to draw parallels to the mother of all elements, the celestial furnaces in the sky, it seems less wild.
A pretty lucky roll of the die nonetheless.
It’s not made of out of exotic elements, mostly just lead and copper. So in theory anyone can make it, but it’s just hard to do it correctly.
My response was, basically, the biggest risk (after toxicity) "is that they got lucky and there are subtle things they did that aren't in the recipe which will turn out to have been critical."
I've done a lot of materials research. It's pretty likely that they got lucky on a small percentage of the samples and spent years trying to figure out what on earth was different. I am excited that 10,000 other labs will stand a very good chance of finding out.
I wonder if the people who steered the discussion just pretended to be experts or what happened. Where were the people who now in these threads explain the reasons why it is really difficult to bake? Or are those the same users?
> Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity, namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample. [1]
If we are to trust the SK team, it's possible the design in the paper is outdated and in-house they have dialed it in to something stable at room temperature.