Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
science.org
science.org
> The authors believe that the modified/strained structure of their material creates a large number of “quantum wells” between particular lead atoms and the adjacent oxygens of the phosphate groups bound to them, in effect making a two-dimensional “electron gas”. They propose that electron tunneling between these quantum wells, which are between 3.7 and 6.5 Ångstroms apart, is the superconducting mechanism. I am not enough of a solid-state physicist to judge this proposal, but the authors are making a detailed mechanistic claim that is subject to experimental proof, which is very good to see, and and they adduce a good deal of data to back it up (x-ray diffraction, EPR, and more). And they demonstrate the behaviors that a superconductor should have, such as the Meissner effect (expulsion of a magnetic field), sudden resistivity changes at a critical temperature (bizarrely high though that is in this case), current-voltage (I-V) plots at different temperatures and under different magnetic field strengths, etc. If these data reproduce, the superconductivity of this material seems beyond doubt.
Plus even if the proposed-mechanism is incorrect and even if the effect is not strong enough for practical engineering... There's value in a "real" (if weak) superconductor which is both easy to fabricate and easy to run tests on.
It could become a starting-point for dozens of other tweaked formulations, enabling all sorts of not-so-expensive experiments and fresh data about how different parameters lead to different electromagnetic outcomes.
This only can carry a small amount of current. I'm not sure how to figure out what small means (numbers are given in the article if you know how to use them!), but if the losses using regular wire are less than the energy needed to make this stuff then it isn't useful.
This is made out of lead. Even if it is useful for transmission, the difficulty of working safely with lead in a factory may mean it is impractical. Or it make leach lead into the real world making it not safe to deploy.
There are probably other ways this can turn into a "it works but isn't practical" thing that would force us to wait for theory (or luck!) to point to something better. What I wrote above is what I can think of in a couple minutes. Only time will tell though, I hope it works out.
Thank you for this.
> This is made out of lead. Even if it is useful for transmission, the difficulty of working safely with lead in a factory may mean it is impractical.
Have you been to a hardware store lately? A huge amount of pipe fittings for gas and non-potable water are made from lead. Factories don’t find it hard to work with lead. It might be inadvisable but it’s not hard.
We can argue about the "working safely" part, but in terms of "does this make it impractical?" the answer seems to be no under the current global regulatory environment.
Lead is still routinely used in many applications today, either in metallic form, from ICE car batteries, to fishing or hunting gear, or as chemical compound in different kinds of glass. And the same can be said about other heavy metals like Cadmium or Mercury. Industries also routinely work with much more nasty things than lead, so it really doesn't sound like a show-stopper.
Lee and Kim first discovered the material in 1999 and have spent 20 years doing other things in between getting help to figure out how to isolate LK-99 and reproduce the correct grain structure.
They eventually got a world class physical chemist, Kwon.
There is now a huge bust up within the team, hence the muddled race to publish and claim credit.
Moreover, you can have more than one thing about a paper be the "relevant" thing.
We should figure that out! But we can definitely keep using all the applications until then. (Except for Tylenol, we keep learning how bad that stuff is)
EDIT: It won't let me post more, so here's the answers to responses.
For sure!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/science-of-cycling-still-mys...
http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh1/gyrobike.htm
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730370-400-how-does...
It's a fun little fact. We know a ton about BUILDING bikes, which is a more useful tool anyway
That said, I'm guessing this one is well understood by experts, but more complex than someone would assume at first glance, and many who have some understanding likely have an incorrect or at least incomplete understanding of how balancing works.
Am I missing something?
As another commenter has pointed out, the proposal of a new mechanism seems to be extraordinary and novel, and could lead to an explosion of new research, so it does indeed seem to be "relevant" on its merits.
I also don't see this as a case of the "why" being left unexplained. In the history of superconducting it has indeed been the case that new cocktails have led to superconductivity without the underlying why being understood. But the commenter that you're responding to quotes part of the paper that shows an awfully specific mechanism.
I understand the sense in which there can be a "why" that remains to be explained in certain circumstances, even when you have a mechanism. Who do monarch butterflies have the black and orange pattern on their wings? There's a cause and effect answer but there's also a "why" answer. But with superconductivity, the mechanism is the why, unless I'm misunderstanding here. If other forms of superconductivity rely on other mechanisms, there isn't going to be a general why connecting this case to the other cases, but nor is there anything left unexplained just by explaining the "why" of this case by explaining it's extraordinary mechanism.
That is a very strange explanation. As someone who has done a decent amount of solid-state physics work, I would expect the explanation to involve a mechanism for pairing of electrons. Mere tunneling between quantum wells has been a staple since the "metamaterials" of the 80s and 90s.
That said, the measured curves do not lie, and I haven't kept up with the field. So I'm all ears (and very much hoping the superconducting revolution is upon us!)
Even better, it's a HUGE claim that is going to show how epistemology in science works (reproduction!!)
How high? Just wondering if it might eventually be possible to use it in some power/clocking distribution layers of a semiconductor chip without bulky cooling.
The critical temperature is 127 C, as the other commenter mentioned. That seems like it's high enough to be useful in a computer CPU.
I suppose there might also be applications for power distribution in a data center. You might use a few large, high-efficiency low voltage DC power supplies to supply the whole site instead of hundreds or thousands of individual power supplies if electrical resistance in cables was less of an issue. (I think this sort of thing is done now, but more at the rack level, since long cable runs cause losses.) You might even use 1V power instead of 5V or 12V.
(Granted, superconducting materials don't have unlimited current capacity, and bad things happen if you exceed the limit.)
There's an additional obstacle factor here which is that the material has to (a) be "sputterable" onto the surface, which may rule out things with fancy crystal requirements, and (b) not adversely react with the rest of the chip, which is why coppper is ruled out (!) and chips use aluminium for metal layers.
>Kim has only co-authored one of the arXiv papers, while the other is authored by his colleagues at the Quantum Energy Research Centre in South Korea, some of whom also applied for a patent on LK-99 in August 2022.
>Both papers present similar measurements, however Kim says that the second paper contains “many defects” and was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. In that paper, the work is described as opening a “new era for humankind”.
>Other experts that New Scientist consulted were similarly sceptical about the results and the data produced. Some raised concern that some of the results could be explained by errors in experimental procedure combined with imperfections in the LK-99 sample.
If true, it seems wild to sit on this kind of discovery for over two years.
Update: Seems like there might be even more history given the name LK-99 apparently comes from the names of its discoverers Dr. Lee and Dr. Kim, and the year of its discovery, 1999 (https://kr.linkedin.com/in/ji-hoon-kim-03508b80).
"YW Kwon" published the first paper with himself as the 3rd author, and "HT Kim" published the second paper a few hours later with himself as the 3rd author.
Pretty interesting drama if that's the case. May indicate neither paper was ready, but that they all think the result is legitimate.
I’m not a physicist expert of superconductors, although I’ve followed quite closely that field since the ‘90s. But if the measurements are similar and correct and if the video of lk-99 levitating above a magnet demonstrating the Meissner effect is not fake, I don’t really have an alternative explanation to account for all of that. I guess that we’ll see what happens in the next week or two. This is too high stakes to take longer than that for a so easily reproducible experiment.
edit: useful comment elsethread by macromaniac on plausibility of diamagnetic effects
Can you please provide a link?
Edit: found it https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
> I would say they are not faking it, but instead they just don’t understand what they are looking at. Based on what measurements they are doing, as well as how they are doing them, they do not have a good understanding of the standard processes to characterise a superconductor. Also, based on their analysis/discussion, they do not have scientific knowledge of the background theory. In review of these two papers, it’s terrible science, not something malicious (as has been seen before in RT superconductivity work…). Even if these claims turn out to be true, it's still terrible science, and that's my main criticism. Either way, these types of claims are not uncommon, see for example this paper from a few years ago which went nowhere. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1807.08572
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/comment/...
His earlier comment that graphite can do the same thing is untrue afaict. Graphite can repel the magnetic field but it would slide off, this is why in diamagnetic experiments multiple magnets are used to keep it in place. In the video it doesnt seem to be sliding anywhere, so imo the video is not showing diamagnetism.
https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
Edit: Actually, now I'm not so sure, it does seem like it's held in place by one corner which is always pointing towards the outside of the magnet, so maybe it is just diamagnetism. If anyone has some pyrolytic carbon and wants to try it out?
Edit2: 99% of YouTube videos on diamagnetism have multiple magnets, the only one I could find that has diamagnetism on one pole magnets shows it not working:
I think it's more than just pyrolytic carbon
Superconducting levitation is just due to the perfect diamagnetism of the superconductor, right?
Welcome to Reddit
> However, only one edge of the flat, coin-like material fully levitates, while the other seems to stay in contact with the magnet. Kim says this is due to the sample being imperfect, which means that only some part of it becomes superconductive and exhibits the Meissner effect.
In the first paper, they claim to measure zero resistance (on a scale of microvolts), but are very careful not to show full RvT curves - in the second paper, we can still see significant changes below Tc where they include more complete curves. How can the resistance change significantly in the superconducting (zero resistance) state? We can actually see significant noise in paper 1 fig. 1c in the ohmic state and it even appears to behave as an insulator at 0 field (increasing resistance with decreasing temperature), but a metal with applied field. There's something wrong with the measurement.
400 K is an odd choice for your superconducting temperature, and just so happens to be the top end of what an MPMS system can measure so is not completely random. Surely it makes sense to measure significantly above this with one of the oven attachments, verify these results with collaborators at other labs even.
10 Gauss is an extremely small field to use for a ZFC-FC measurement and again if their superconducting Tc is at or above 400K they need higher temperature data to show anything about the phase transition.
The claim that they have measured the density of states is completely unjustified - not even a citation. I don't know how you can believe that to be the case.
And in general the presentation both of the data and the paper itself is poor - if you just made a groundbreaking discovery like this, wouldn't you care?
Hell no! If I had made a discovery of similar magnitude I would have done exactly what they’ve done: push out a rough preprint ASAP to reserve my Nobel prize, then take a deep breath, relax and take my time dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s for the real paper in Nature.
That doesn’t mean they’re correct, but there’s nothing inherently suspicious about the way this has unfolded.
> So, to clarify for my nonexpert brain, if this were a superconductor and their measurements were accurate:
> Fig 5 means the sample must be completely pure to be a superconductor
> The rest of the paper indicates the sample must have impurities.
> So it's pretty safe to say that either it's not a superconductor or their measurements are wrong (or most likely both). Since they never got it to the critical temperature and showed the full Meissner effect, if the measurements are wrong it's fair to say they don't have evidence for superconductivity anyway, just diamagnetism, which isn't really that big a deal
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/comment/...
In any case, the need for impurities would not itself surprise. Having controlled amounts of impurities is called "doping", it is well-known from studying semiconductors and other high temperature superconductors that the amount of doping can have a huge impact on a substance's properties.
See https://physicsworld.com/a/the-ups-and-downs-of-doping/ for verification of this point.
> 1b) shows the resistivity at some unknown temperature. They are applying current and measuring no potential drop. Just what? First, state the temperature, next measure it as a function of temperature. At the critical temperature the resistance drops to zero. All they have shown is that the contact inputting the current is probably disconnected…
this does not pass the sniff test for me. I explained on reddit myself why I think it doesn't make sense.
The only way that could work is if they just straight up fabricated everything, and in that case all bets are off.
I can't comment about the others since I don't know enough about it. Considering 1b) makes no sense with a modicum of knowledge, I really doubt the veracity of the rest.
This isn't 1 experiment. This is 20 years of research leaking because of a fight over credit.
One of the co-authors of the 6-author-paper, Hyun-Tak Kim, is at least answering questions about superconductor theory on Quora starting five years ago, whatever that counts for.
He states there "I am studying the MIT mechanism in strongly correlated systems, the high-Tc mechanism in cuprate superconductors, the MIT devices, and quantum transistors.".
There's just way too much going on for this to be a sloppy mistake. It's either real or a fraud, and in both cases the alleged errors aren't particularly important.
This one's in Korean but there are some plots here that I think several people said were missing.
What? How do they get funding and lab space if they can't read their own measurements? Something is fishy here.
The first paper was published by YW Kwon with himself as the third author. The second paper was published a few hours later by Hyun-Tak Kim with himself as the third author. As others have pointed out there can only be 3 names on the ticket for a nobel prize.
To me this might indicate that they all think the result is potentially nobel-worthy, and also that the papers may not be as complete / rigorous as they should have been due to this drama / race to publish (YW Kwon published without permission to get his name out there, forcing Hyun-Tak to push his out a few hours later)
When published, the authors made it clear: this is probably wrong, but we can’t see where we made a mistake … so what if we’re right and just upended relativity theory?
That was turned out to be a measuring error [1]. This one may be the same, though the lead authors publishing two versions of the paper - one with only 3 names, ostensibly because the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a maximum of 3 people - suggests less modesty and vulnerability on their behalf.
I hope they’re right though!
As far as I know, the only explanations for this occurring is room temp superconductivity, or a strong diamagnetism (which would also be very cool to see)!
https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/pyrolytic_graphi...
I am not an expert in this field though.
https://www.imagesco.com/magnetism/graphite-levitation-kit.h...
https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/pyrolytic_graphi...
German, but nevertheless: http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9a3f8740
"I work in the field [...] we don't believe a word of this. [...] The data set in Fig. 4(b) is also a treat. It is VERY unusual when the heat capacity decreases again at high temperatures. This can happen at low temperatures, but not at high temperatures. [...] My personal assumption is that the authors measured an insulator, so no current flow and therefore no voltage occurred (4-point measurement). This would look like a superconductor. But if you then turn up the current (i.e. the applied voltage), breakdowns may occur and a current begins to flow. That would explain the sharp increase."
A more plausible idea IMO is that it could be a 4-point measurement of a highly inhomogeneous sample. If the current probes make contact with conductive parts of the sample, and there is a conductive path between them, but one or both voltage probes are not contacting the conductive path, then the voltage measurement would be garbage and potentially zero.
I don’t think this is much of a problem when measuring conventional conductors (you don’t need a particularly good contact, which is much of the point), but a lot of superconductors are oddball materials where, under conditions where they fail to superconduct, they barely conduct at all.
So maybe the sample has a conducting phase and an insulating phase?
A 4-point measurement of an insulator would show zero current, as far as I know.
I know they were formed from sulfur compounds, but the production process should have eliminated those compounds, and the final forming is done in a vacuum so there shouldn't be any oxide generation to form non-conductive barriers.
I don't know much about the process but shouldn't they be testing resistance in a superconductor?
"I work in the field and we discussed the preprint a bit in the research group this morning. In a nutshell, we don't believe a word of it:
Fig. 1(a) and (c) are implausible. Normally, this sort of thing looks like this. Note the gradual increase at low currents, this effect is especially expected for magnetic fields.
Also Fig. 1(d) cannot be correct. At Tc ~ 400K the Meissner effect would displace a much stronger field than 10 Oe = 1 mT. I.e. the distinction between FC (field cooled) and ZFC (zero-field cooled) should not be so pronounced. It should look more like this.
But in this case the temperature dependence does not agree at all with the critical currents of Fig. 1(a) and (c).
And also that ALL values in Fig. 1(d) are negative is extremely unusual, but this could perhaps be argued.
The data set in Fig. 4(b) is also a treat. It is VERY unusual to see the heat capacity decrease again at high temperatures. This can happen at low temperatures, but rather not at high temperatures.
I know the described experimental setup / cryostat very well. There is no reasonable reason why the authors did not measure at higher temperatures to show that the behavior above Tc ~ 400K is significantly different. E.g. a temperature dependence of the resistance would have been mandatory.
In general, the paper is very poorly written. The data are not adequately discussed, the explanations are poor, and the papers cited are rather, shall we say, meager. This does not inspire confidence in what the authors have measured and want to have seen there.
My personal guess is that the authors measured an insulator, accordingly no current flowed, and thus no voltage occurred (4-point measurement). Then it looks like a superconductor. But if you then turn up the current (i.e. the applied voltage), there may be breakdowns and a current starts to flow. This would explain the sudden increase."But the papers don’t show that. There’s no obvious contradiction unless you make some big assumptions.
The low quality video and poorly presented graphs are reminiscent of Victor Ninov's fraud.
Meh, it's just as easy to assume the opposite. Who has a stronger incentive to present themselves in the best possible light, a con artist, or a future noble prize winner with a patent on an earth-shattering technology? For the former, the credulity of the reader is necessary for the success of the con! For the latter, not so much, as the truth will be self evident in short order.
If it is a misrepresentation I'd be curious about the back story. I mean, even if it's not been knowingly done it will presumably seriously hurt the careers of the people involved; if it is knowingly I assume it will be "find a job in another field" kind of thing.
How could you suspect it wouldn't come out if it's knowingly? If un-knowingly how could you make an amazing claim like this without being absolutely sure of what's going on? If it's a "rush to publish" type thing - why wouldn't you make a big point of that in the paper (i.e. load it with caveats to the brim)? Plus this comment makes it sounds like it's been sat on for at least what seems to me like a fair amount of time.
All the options seem implausible but at the end of the day one of them must be the case. For the sake of everyone I'm pulling that it is what it says on the tin.
Also, on the sentences in the manuscripts trying to explain the effect: I think that is wild guess at best. The measurement results done in the manuscripts probably can be taken at at face value (at least until there is a reproduction). Whether they really indicate superconductivity or something else that looks like it in some of the aspects is then a different question.
For almost two weeks they were fully locked, and now one can only see the original post and not the thread, and all browsing is locked out.
This is an excellent summary and like Derek I have high hopes (but low expectations) that by the end of this week we'll see some tentative confirmation. This stuff isn't particularly hard (or expensive!) to make so that should really make for interesting news and some very fun products if it is proven out.
The bigger the impact the more of a splash it will make in social contexts consequently we see a lot of blatant and cautious naysayers with various explanations and individual explanations for the logic of their refutation.
But it’s If it’s shocking enough, groundbreaking enough, anyone with the expertise to try will do so either to see if it’s right instead of waiting around for someone else to do it and write it up and publish it, or to prove that it’s not and for something this big at least, give BobbyBrocolli a new possible video topic to consider.
It’s notable that the first publications about attempts to reproduce the Cold Fusion experiment all reported positive results.
It’s probably because experimenters who got negative results decided they might have done something wrong so they kept trying, and delayed, and they did not publish until later.
Those early reports of positive results were largely retracted within a few weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment?useskin=ve... ("Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology")
Publishing an exact reproduction is difficult, but a new record a few degrees hotter is easy. (And even another variant with a lower temperature and more tolerance for current or magnetic field can be published with the right text.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
nothing happened, of course, but the idea of an elegant energy source was so seductive.
If you see a report of a groundbreaking experiment that only measure the heat of the air, you can safely press the "meh" button.
Yes, probably
This blog talks about some of the many pitfalls that could mislead researchers: https://coldfusionblog.net/2019/03/13/the-case-against-cold-...
Some of the errors are very subtle. It’s not surprising that mistakes were made
The summary was basically that, designing a reliable calorimetry equipment and experiment suitable for use in Fleischmann-like experiments is just uniquely challenging, it remained an unsolved problem even decades after the initial fiasco. The whole experiment setup is inherently error-prone. I found it was pretty interesting.
One researcher P.J. King who recently attempted a replication [1] commented online [2] that:
> We observed the claimed heat effect, both in magnitude and duration, in our parallel __control__ cells. This indicates a calibration error in the apparatus. One little known fact about these electro-chemical cell experiments is that they are run for a week or more before the effect is observed. Typically, calibration is conducted over a few hours and is done both before an experimental run and intermittently during it, to re-check thermal stability.
> We submit that this approach to calibration is inadequate for establishing a calorimeter’s propensity for heat artifacts. Stability over time periods longer than the experiment should be demonstrated in order to minimize the possibility of misinterpreting the fluctuations that we observed as “excess heat” events.
> Consequently, we contend that all claims of anomalous heat in LENR experiments using electro-chemical cells that do not exhibit thermal stability on a time period longer than the time duration of the experiment itself must be thrown out. As the majority of research over the past 30 years has not demonstrated this kind of calibration stability, that eliminates most of the effort in this field. You can read more about our work on the ReResearch LLC website.
> That is not to say that we know everything about hot fusion in the solid state or how quantum mechanical interactions might impact fusion reactivity. There is much still to be discovered. But these electro-chemical LENR heat experiments are noise, not signal.
[1] Guffey, Mason J., Yang Tang, and P.J. King. 2016. “Attempted Replication of Excess Heat in the Letts Dual-Laser Experiment.” Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 20 (1): 1–28.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbzcYQVrTxQ&lc=UgzFM3zS0QyP5...
* people looking for fusion neutrons, who did not have much experience with the finickiness of neutron detectors and who reported seeing them when they were getting experimental errors, and
* people looking for excess heat, which was simply inherently difficult to measure accurately.
On the other hand, there wasn't a publication delay for the negative reports; within a week the groups started talking to each other and realized they weren't unique in not finding anything.
> I have bad news. I am growing increasingly convinced that LK-99 is simply diamagnetic, rather than superconducting. It lines up well with existing evidence (susceptibility, levitation, lack of heat capacity singularity, etc.)
> Discovering a new diamagnet is cool, but .... obviously way less cool
reminded me of this asianometry video on a similar much hyped korean breakthrough in biology, and the sad aftereffects of it
https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
makes it look like a diamagnetically levitating piece of graphite moving over multiple magnets in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-tW8_SRW3g
Why am I wrong? I want to believe!
At this point they were able to isolate the material but it took a few years to figure out how to produce it reliable. They bring in HyunTak who has Western ties and has a respectable reputation being a well known physical chemist.
They file patents in 2022 and 2023 and some in the group are nervous that because the process is so simple they'll get scooped. Spies, etc.
HyunTak wants to do more work before publishing but Kwon just goes ahead and published the paper with him, Lee, and Kim as the authors. HyunTak gets word of this and publishes his paper with him, Lee, and Kim and some others later that day.
I think because of this, it is real. Infighting over credits and the fact that HyunTak is extremely respectable.
Only a few days left until replications should start pouring in...
Is that even possible?
He’s omitted from the second author.
I do believe they believe they have something nobel-prize worthy.
They offered to help with replication in other labs, which is a good sign.
Could still be measurement error, we just need to wait until it gets replicated.
Or as the article talks about, is this just a pointer at other possibilities that would be the real game changers?
Not only products would be impacted but experiments too, particularly particle experiments. All colliders need some sort of ridiculous magnetic field which uses a close loop helium chiller.
Long term wise, anything that uses electromagnetic fields would be impacted, like motors and generators. You in theory can get stupidly efficient motors (99%+) motors with super conductors.
- A global power net. No solar power during the night? Just produce it on the other side of the planet.
- A superconducting computer. Less resistance when pushing bits around = 500x less power consumption.
- A Superconducting magnetic battery. Store power indefinitely with high efficiency.
ETA: wrong
Whether or not we can manufacture/shrink the superconductor circuits enough to be competitive with semiconductors is another question, but my naive interpretation is that if you can make the superconductor circuits 100x larger than a silicon circuit, it is still going to have significant advantages.
This sounds like it has interesting ramifications for global politics. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, one major lever the Russian government had was to enable blackouts in Ukraine. Makes you wonder how a global power network could work in light of international conflict.
But the main one that is screaming at me for this technology sitting in front of us is SQUID sensors and RF antennas that will operate in the lower power range of the potential applications spectrum.
AFAIK loss at AC still occurs with superconductors because the dielectric loss through the materials still exists.
Of course if you can make wire out of it, I wonder how much smaller your fusion reactor can get?
There are a lot of applications for even a thin film, consider spray coating a resonant cavity with it.
I'm sure there is a way to improve almost anything you could think about if you start talking about making CPUs with lower heat dissipation, perhaps enabling 3D designs and much more efficient computing... [edit: obviously there is a limit from literally the entropy in computing and transistors are most of that, I wonder if the superconductor is a good thermal conductor...]
I'm sure there are at least 222 startups that have some idea they're pitching right now ;-)
Wildly improved efficiency on some sensors, antenna, motors, etc.
So, long distance electricity transmission, motors, generators, MRI machines and magnetic confinement nuclear fusion reactors for example.
That said, the material as synthesized might not be very good for some particular application. The current handling capacity might not be good enough, or it might not be physically strong enough to use as motor windings.
I don't know enough to do the comparison, but I'd be curious how this new material holds up when compared to copper or aluminum wire in terms of current capacity, weight, strength, and cost of materials. One of the big reasons for skepticism about humanity's prospects for converting to a non-fossil-fuel based energy system is that there just isn't enough of the important metal resources to build all the batteries/EVs/transmission lines/solar panels/windmills we need. I myself am skeptical of the skeptics because I think the resource bottlenecks are overstated and there are usually acceptable workarounds, but I do think copper is going to be in very high demand over then next several decades. If we have a good, cheap copper alternative then that solves that problem. (It also introduces another, as we would then have to deal with enormous quantities of lead-based cabling.)
Near term may be useful for devices which take advantage of quantum effects such as Superconducting QUantum interference devices or SQUIDs.
Use in microelectronics may be possible, but is likely quite difficult. Making complicated structures out of this material will require radically new microelectronic manufacturing processes. HTSC microelectronics don't exist as far as I can tell.
If critical field can be improved things get interesting. If it can be increased to that of known HTSCs at liquid nitrogen temperatures(critical field scales with temperature), that's interesting because this material should be cheaper.
If it can be increased moderately at room temperature, there is the potential for it replacing rare earth magnets because the material should be cheaper.
"Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” --Venkman
In general, the answer to this question is "no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
If someone claimed to have a complex proof, i dont think people would stop and drop everything.
If someone claimed to have a constructive solution to p=np, claimed to have implemented it, and put the code on github - yeah i think lots of people would drop everything to run it and see if it works.
Im not a physicist, but maybe with the relative ease on making this material (according to other comments) it is more like the second situation.
Scientists can move far quicker than you expect, and a positive or negative replication of this superconductor claim should be a very easy publication to grab. It would definitely be worth alloting a few weeks of grad student time to replicating this ASAP to get that publication.
That said, I remember reading about shockley having ideas about the transistor that he only fessed up to as his other more open collaborators started understanding the phenomenon.
Labs all over the world are dropping everything to replicate this. It's simple self interest.
It only takes 2-3 days and the people involved in the paper are credible.
If it's real, your lab would be at the forefront of the biggest revolution since the transistor. If it's real, there will be hundreds of papers on the topic by next year. Your lab could be the one to discover a variant that can carry more current, that could have patent on the material of the future power grid. The papers that provide the basics for how this works and the data that everyone will be using will get 100k+ citations in a few years. The PhD students that become experts in this will be in high demand everywhere.
Whether people will stop what they are doing to verify it is literally a matter of people stopping what they are doing. University labs are usually quick on that.
I would have figured ATF. What drug can you synthesize with phosphorus? (EDIT: Apparently meth [1].)
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/09/25/00-2455...
From the linked article:
> You can bet that furnaces in solid-state materials labs around the world have been cooking yesterday and today to try to reproduce its synthesis and the properties, and we should be hearing about the results of these experiments very soon. The first samples should be coming out of the quartz vessels. . .sometime tomorrow, perhaps? Depends on what was available around the lab!
I don't think, at least generally, work is as rigid as indicated. At least at white collar jobs, and especially a research lab, and most especially a university research lab.
I'd expect some lab out there to report a result by the end of the week. The synthesis really is super simple, just grinding powders together and baking in a furnace. Granted, the final product has to be baked under vacuum, but that's not super difficult to achieve. The authors sealed the material in a quartz tube and baked in a standard furnace.
Enough of all the UFO nonsense, this is what matters for the future
> If these data reproduce, the superconductivity of this material seems beyond doubt.
> Another welcome feature is that their procedure for preparing LK-99 seems quite straightforward. You can bet that furnaces in solid-state materials labs around the world have been cooking yesterday and today to try to reproduce its synthesis and the properties, and we should be hearing about the results of these experiments very soon.
2. The disc is not hovering.
3. The disc is damaged; one edge is thicker/heavier than the other. Thus causes the rolling. Notice that the heavier part always stays on the magnet. It it were superconductive they would be able use a uniform disc.
I call BS.
And if it's not completely superconductive, what stops it from not being completely magnetic? For all we know, only the thin part could be magnetic, being repelled from the magnet below.
Why do you think any of these are true?
"Who knows what could come out of that? Robust high-current-density room-temperature superconductors are right out of science fiction (SF readers will recall that one such material was a big plot point in Larry Niven’s Ringworld). Electrical generation and transmission, antennas, power storage, magnet applications (including things like fusion power plants), electric motors and basically everything that runs on electricity would be affected. We could stop throwing away so much generated power on heating up the wires that deliver it, for starters."
What matters is how lead is handled. With hope, mankind will never lead a generation the way burning millions of gallons of leaded fuel did. Certainly no use of a lead superconductor could hope to accomplish that level of damage.
> At atmospheric pressure the temperature record is still held by cuprates, which have demonstrated superconductivity at temperatures as high as 138 K (−135 °C).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
Here is hoping this is that breakthrough.
I stopped reading after this confession of the author. So this text is just as good as a opinion of some other random guy.
His conclusions here are similar to the hivemind opinion in the first post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624 My takeaway is:
1) It must be confirmed. (And if confirmed it's huge.)
2) The method to make the material are very easy (if you have a good lab)
For me, this post confirm that the chemistry part makes sense. Perhaps there was something weird abut the composition of the ceramic. Perhaps about the method to make it? If he says that it looks fine, for me it's a nice confirmation that it makes sense.
The explanation of the effect using "quantum wells" is more strange. I feel it's suspicious and that it will be explained in a different way in the future. Anyway, I'm neither an expert in superconductivity, so I may be wrong. I don't know his opinion about the "quantum wells" but I guess he also is not an expert in that field to evaluate it.
Superconductivity is a field where the experimental results usually arrive long before the theoretical ones, so assuming this is new material is true, it is possible that we get a lot of new materials in the next 10 years and a good theoretical explanation in 50 years.
The author has enough relevant experience to be able to safely conclude a similar thing. They are honest that they won’t spot minor issues, but my takeaway from this article is that the original paper authors are not cowboys or bullshitters, and they have a chance at a real finding, subject to regular research bugs.
That’s good enough to be worth an article!
Would this have implications about possible efficient methods of converting heat back into electricity? Or even just more ways of harnessing heat energy in general. I'm imagining heat pumps built with superconductors could be a critical part of mitigating climate change, but I'm far from a scientist and barely understand the physics here.
Is it a case that some technology is now available that unlocked this? Or is this trying something and seeing if it works?
Could this discovery have been made 10-20 years ago?
The semiconductor characterization people at any fab could really get to the bottom of this.
South Korea has been waiting for a (real, STEM) Nobel prize for decades.
These guys will be worshipped as gods if they deliver
I’ll draw an analogy to the LLMs and diffusion models that have lately rocked the computer world. These things are straight up science fiction. I would have said computers would have never been capable of art and poetry. It was all fantasy until it was suddenly reality.
We’ll probably know if this can be replicated relatively soon. And if it can it will kick off a whole new branch of materials science and begin a multi-year race to commercialization.
We are facing gigantic challenges in energy and climate. We need the win, so my fingers are crossed.
North Korea: "We're still working on reliable electricity."
And rightfully so. Humanity is moved by great people and these would be great people. We would build monuments to them to symbolize their importance.
Ouch.
Alfred Nobel would probably find this characterization very ironic.
psht, as if
Electricity would be cheaper and more plentiful than water in many areas.
You build a big inductor, and because it's superconducting current just goes round and round. At room temperature you have no refrigeration losses, you can build more just as fast as you can kick out superconductor. It would be 100% efficient, have 0 self-discharge, and enormous power capacity and infinite power cycles.
Even the one with (as he put it) 'the mistakes in it' !!