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Comment by algesten | Hacker News Reader

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algesten·

> ...allows it to carry current with zero resistance at 3.5 Kelvin (about -453 degrees Fahrenheit)

Seems to me this is a problem.

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It's an interesting result, but yeah, not a room temperature superconductor.

For that matter, we've had superconductors for decades that work at much higher temperatures than this one.

It seems the breakthrough is that you could use familiar semiconductor manufacturing processes. However the temperature is still going to be a major issue. I don't want a computer that requires liquid helium cooling.

> you could use familiar semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Unclear to me why that's helpful. Materials that superconduct at a higher temperature than this one aren't hard to come by, or obscure:

> In 1913, lead was found to superconduct at 7 K,

Probably because they don’t behave well for normal lithography techniques? The high temp superconductors I know of are weird meta materials, and good luck getting them to exist in chip form at all.

> I don't want a computer that requires liquid helium cooling.

True, but I /can/ see someone, such as Sandia National Labs, very much willing to install a liquid helium cooled computer if it provides a significant performance increase above their existing supercomputer installations.

Isn’t that very close to the practical limit for cooling in a lab?

Not that hard. A dilution fridge, used for instance for cooling quantum computers, can go much lower:

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

Quantum devices are already cooled to that temperature (at least for some technologies), so it's not a problem in that use case.

Thanks!

Was gonna be lazy and say… temp or is doesn't matter.

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