LK-99 research continues, paper says superconductivity could be possible
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
And that's if their models and assumptions are correct. If it works.
The way I see it, the best this material can do for us is advance our theoretical understanding of superconductivity. There's no grand theory of how molecular/crystal structure relates to superconductivity. But maybe we've gotten a little bit closer.
The UFO-tears were also at our level at some point. How far out in the future are we talking before humans can do this? Is there anything fundamental that would prevents us from doing it?
Also, it's the replicator from Star Trek, isn't it?
The silicon wafers are grown from the bottom-up, but silicon is as chemically simple as it gets -- a pure element!
LK99 would be tougher to grow (correctly, and assuming that there is a specific superconducting configuration from among several semiconducting configurations,) by at least several orders of magnitude. Growing pristine crystals of such a complex and entropic material is something that has never been attempted.
Because the steel ball needs to be a perfect sphere, and no one in China could produce such finely honed materials prior to then.
Computer chips were impossible 100 years ago, for many of the same reasons, and the chips we make today, impossible to manufacture 20 years ago.
If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
Because that's how it's worked, always. Put another way, if required, we'll do a solve.
Because that's what we humans do.
For the balls in pens, I think there was one factory in Japan that did that very well, and they had no qualms about exporting them to China at reasonable prices, so China could make pens fine enough, just the ball used in n high quality ones (which, were the ones that would actually sell) used a ball imported from Japan. The minister was angry the pens weren’t 100% Chinese, rather than just 99% Chinese.
One can easily imagine that there are many such components produced in China that other countries aren’t currently tooled to produce economically, so it’s not weird or very unprecedented that China wasn’t previously set up to make perfect balls for pens.
This rumor has been refuted many times. It is not hard core science to produce such "finely honed material", no one bothered to make it because the total market volume is way too small for typical modern steelmakers. Only 100 tons of such "finely honed material" is consumed in China each year and it is declining for obvious reasons.
There were heated debate in China for the particular matter - should China enter all such tiny specific segment to compete with every country. You don't need a smart brain to come to the right conclusion here.
> If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
Obviously this is not the case.
Americans are not building high speed rails, not because it doesn't bring in the so called value, it is because such investment would threat the interests of those airliners. How much the US invested in high speed rail in the last 20 years compared to its total $ spent on wars?
It is also lagging on productions of EVs, maybe EVs don't bring in values? LOL
> And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
until you get yourself de-industrialized and then it is over.
It doesn't bring in so called value versus the investment assuming actual final costs of building such a system. Except the north east however the cost of buying land to build it there and revamping existing infra like stations is a massive. People keep wishing it did but a system that is slower (door to door) and less convenient (lack of local public transit) than airplanes isn't particularly good.
America is pretty bad at building other infrastructure, too.
NY subway does not threaten interests of airlines, but its expansion is notoriously slow and expensive.
Aquiring the rights of way is an enormous undertaking due to rule of law. Getting construction permits is an enormous undertaking due to environmental law. Determining the path and stops is a giant political mess because nobody wants to miss out on being on the rail, but if you let everyone on, it won't be high speed anymore.
The whole thing won't have a lot of return until decades after it begins and only if it offers good comparative utility and value when it's delivered, which depends on the state of roads, air travel, virtual presence, and other things that affect demamd for travel.
Similar to UAP
If this does prove as a path to high temperature super conductivity under normal or at least achievable pressures then it would open a whole new world of potential materials for material scientists to explore.
Our understanding of superconductivity is already incomplete we do not have a working theory for current high temperature (~100k) superconductors either.
Now, there is some value in continued work that ignores consensus or popularity. Consensus doesn't mean absolute certainty and historically big leaps have been made in areas people consider lost causes or wastes of time pursing. So, its good that we don't abandon searching the knowledge spaces entirely, but I will say that's often not the driving motive. It has more to do with careers and putting food on the table, such is the ecosystem that is research. LK99 won't disappear for quite awhile and people will continue novel research in the area.
The manuscript that it refers to does not contain any calculations concerning superconducivity of the material, so it cannot say anything about it aside from vague guesses. There are no manuscripts I know on arXiv that contain calculations that suggest the material "should" be superconducting. This paper and several other discuss flat bands, but as noted in https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05143 and elsewhere flat bands are no reason to expect superconductivity, especially the kinds that this material supports.
So there is no theoretical support for this material to be in any way good for superconductivity.
There is also no good experimental support. The crystal structure suggested in the original papers has been reproduced, but is found to be an insulator. Reproduction attempts of superconducting features have universally failed, and alternative explanations for the original measurements (which are fairly sloppy) exist. So there's not much reason to believe there ever was anything interesting there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts
Even if it doesn't pan out, maybe it will still advance superconductor development otherwise via government and private investment.
Supposedly, a University in Taiwan is working to validate the full version of the paper and the material, and the authors of the paper say that once confirmation is complete (and is successful) they will release the full version of the paper... sometime in 2024.
We'll see what happens, I guess.
https://research.ibm.com/projects/atom-and-molecule-manipula...
Ok then, perhaps using ULV lithography (aka microprocessor design) could do it.
Pity those machines take billions of $$$ to work with, so it's unlikely someone would try. Hmmm, unless there is a research institute doing something like those lines.
Lithography is about as close as we can do, but that takes multiple stages to do each individual layer otherwise you can’t get patterns just undifferentiated layers.
If you don’t need atomic precision for arbitrary patterns there are many options. Crystals can grow much faster, but you have minimal control over how they grow etc.
Who said that's the max theoretical speed? And that it can't be parallel. You're sure putting a lot of constraints on a theoretical argument.
Further, that’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of difficulty here. It’s ignoring chemical interactions, thermal issues, sensors, control mechanisms etc etc.
Trying to slap two arbitrary atomic structures together doesn’t automatically work. Sure, you could use some binding agent like glue etc, but now you’re limited to structures which include that binding material. Thus if the goal is to be able to produce arbitrary structures only limited by their stability you can’t necessarily join together separate pieces.
So not the bulk superconductor we need, indeed, but that could be interesting for microelectronics.
Electricity is disturbances in the electromagnetic field. A difference between the electromagnetic field on the surface of the conductor, super or not, and the empty space around it. What conductors do is to propagate that field, perfectly in the case of superconductors, across their surface. It is not necessary for surfaces of pieces of the superconductor to actually touch to propagate that field. There can even be stuff in between, if it doesn't conduct it won't heat up and usually won't disturb the superconductivity.
(what it does is it slightly lowers the point, in current, where superconductivity breaks down)
So you can just stack them close to each other in our 3 traditional dimensions, because the superconductive region doesn't have to be continuous, just close enough. That will work fine, that's how it works in current superconductors.
I was thinking maybe a bulk crystal could be a layer in ICs.
My guess is that they started this during peak LK-99, and it got published just now, too late for the news wave.
I was very optimistic during the first week, but the evidence so far is not convincing. Unless you work in superconductors, you can probably just ignore this until some experimental evidence appears.