Magnetic field sorting of superconducting graphite particles with Tc>400K (2024)

I think the idea behind it is really clever. You don't know how to manufacture the material. Create a test that separates the good particles. Sieve through mountain of crushed material, out comes small amount of good stuff. Genius.

The idea that graphite may contain in inclusions that are superconducting at room temperature is highly speculative (putting it mildly) and not an idea that is taken seriously in the condensed matter physics community.

This is from October 2024 and appears to have made no splash whatsoever, which probably tells you what you need to know about it.

So we’ve gone from the best semiconductor we can manage is -73 degrees C at huge pressures to we can do it past water boiling? This is a huge leap forward no?

> It suggests that, if the Aquadag paint instead of being fabricated from normal graphite particles is made from the sorted superconducting ones, we would obtain a superconducting paint whose resistance might be possibly zero above room temperature allowing for the design of superconducting circuits at room temperature

There must be some nuance here that requires some expertise to understand since I would think Tc up to 500K is way above room temperature but they’re being very cautious about saying they could build such circuits. Is that because circuit manufacturing is an even higher temperature process or something else?

This seems like a revolutionary result that’s the first step in changing everything we do in electronics from computers to travel. What’s the reason to contain excitement?

all of the standard caviats apply of course, but the premise is in itself worthy of attention and fits in with a great deal of the background work in all of human technology ,ie: " wait, wait some of this stuff is different, look there, there it did a THING", its how our ancient ancestors got us ceramics and metals and glass. And the history of white light led's started with exceptionaly rare, fluke, white light led's, that eventualy were proven to be the result of very tiny amounts of "contamenents" that produced the effect, took them decades to narrow it down, and figure it out, and then scale up to production levels. Now the research tools are, way better, smaller, cheaper, and in thousands of labs world wide....so

I gotta say wow.

This is the first potentially viable mechanism I've heard of that might just do this, it's also easily verifiable - using existing non room temperature super conductors.

like panning for gold, but using their magnetic properties.

if you can sort say -127'C superconductors by putting them through the field at <-127'C

then you can sort 30'C superconductors by putting them through the field at <30'C

This sounds like it has great potential across the board - one of the biggest issues so far - at least as my very limited knowledge understand it - even for the lower temperature superconductors has been removing the "bad" material, a "cheap and easy" method to do that sounds like a great leap forward.

Is magnetic field sorting a novel method for superconductors in general?

What is it about cold temperatures that makes something superconductive?

There are a lot of skeptical comments here, but the authors make this claim in the abstract:

> We have obtained a concentrate of above room temperature superconducting particles.

Is this just a lie?

This sounds too good to be true, yet the paper is oddly compelling.

They don't claim to explain how it works, they just provide a method to find naturally occurring superconductive particles and sort them out, presumably, so we can further study them and hopefully, figure out how to make more, more reliably.

Would a room temperature superconductor that costs, say, $100k for a pound be useful in any way?

What about the superconducting graphite particles with a TC <$400k/yr?

lk99 v2.0.0

400k ~ 260f / 127c