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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this research cited a few times (perhaps even here on HN) and every time the conversation is centered on whether this is practical or the naysayers moaning how this isn't practical.

The research isn't intended for commercial, practical use. There is no point in discussing it in such terms.

The interesting thing is that this behavior was predicted by models, and the experiment confirms the model. That is it. Perhaps with increased confidence in the models it will lead to improvements in practical superconductors in time, but not now.

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It is funny really. A lot of progress:

1) Is a small incremental improvement in theory. Critics deride it as impractical. Eg, Evidence for superconductivity above 260 K.

2) Is a slightly novel recombination of existing ideas where the ideas have all happened before. Critics deride it as derivative. Eg, the iPhone iterations after the first.

From the big-picture perspective as long as something happens that is new in some sense we will eventually achieve real progress. Consistent small improvements are just as good as one big improvement, except apparently harder to appreciate.

> the conversation is centered on whether this is practical or the naysayers moaning how this isn't practical.

this is par for the course for almost every thread on a research paper. Perhaps it is to be expected, given that this is a website catered to non-scientists

I'd say the topic even exaggerates this response, since a practical superconductor would be revolutionary.

As you seem to understand this topic a bit more: can you explain the model?

What is the current theory how superconductors work?

I don't know anything about superconductors other than what I have read in articles like this one. But even for someone like me, it is obvious that this is a confirmation of theory, not a practical result.

> What is the current theory how superconductors work?

The best general model of superconductivity I'm aware of is still the BCS model:

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

This model basically says a superconductor is a Bose-Einstein condensate, where the Bose "particles" are pairs of electrons in the material that are entangled via an interaction involving low-energy vibration states of the material as a whole. The problem is that this general model doesn't tell us what the critical temperature for the Bose-Einstein condensation is. We have to find that out by a combination of experimentation with different materials, and more detailed extensions of the model that test various hypotheses about what kinds of material properties should affect the critical temperature. This paper is just a recent development in that line of research.

Have any more papers come out on the graphene based superconductors? There was some based on alkane composites and some based on sheets at irrational angles to one another. Dependin on alkane bond angles and their interaction with graphene, those might be the same thing.

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