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The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

arxiv.org

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Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#51

Post by eterevsky »

slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

> the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years

I would say that electronic computers would take take the first spot for me, but I don't deny that room-temperature superconductors would be pretty close to the top.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#53

Post by PaulHoule »

sheepscreek wrote: post #48

One of the authors in a related paper[1] is Hyun-Tak Kim. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals[2]. One even has > 1500 citations[3]. I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon. 1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O show…

Unlike those guys in Rochester, this seems to be a good experiment that is testing many of the signs of superconductivity.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#54

Post by PaulHoule »

slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

To change the world it has to be manufacturable at scale, stable, etc.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#55

Post by klyrs »

danbruc wrote: post #31

After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bit less legitimate to me and they could of course always have some error in there setup. The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the…

(note: using language that accepts the claims of the paper for simplicity -- I remain skeptical)

For what it's worth, superconductors have a shared budget[1] of (magnetic field, temperature, current). At 25°C, the material is near its critical temperature, so its current-carrying capacity is necessarily diminished. At a lower temperature, the film should be able to carry more current.

That said, 250mA is plenty of current if you're interested in making a superconducting CPU.

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/scbc2.html

edit after reading the paper: they claim an extraordinarily high critical temperature of ~126°C. You can see the temperature dependence in Figure 1e; they're much further from the critical temperature than I expected, and at room temperature, a little cooling appears to go a long way. I'm eager to see an attempt to reproduce this result. That said, the material is essentially a 2d molecule -- we've been hyped on graphene for decades, and have yet to see it integrated into a scalable process.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#56

Post by rewmie »

eterevsky wrote: post #51
slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

> the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years I would say that electronic computers would take take the first spot for me, but I don't deny that room-temperature superconductors would be pretty close to the top.

I'd say that not keeping electronic computers in mind is a testament to how big of a discovery they were, in the sense that we need to think hard about transformative discoveries to realize that not so long ago humanity didn't had electronic computers,and yet they are everywhere.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#57

Post by sfink »

alsaaro wrote: post #41
slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

They claim to have observed the Meisner effect, quantum locking unique to superconductors, a pretty big signal, so more likely fraud than a mistake.

Yes, normally when people come up with some BS about room temperature superconducting, they really just mean they've observed one of the indirect effects of superconductivity. "If you put an ohmmeter in my funky circuit, it displays zero!" Which usually just means you've come up with a clever way to break an ohmmeter.

Ejecting the magnetic field (the Meissner effect) is a way better sign.

I find it very hard to believe that this could be true, but at least they're measuring the right things.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#58

Post by benlivengood »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #49
slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

Even if we found the perfect material, where it was easy and cheap to create long strong wires for power transmission as well as semiconductor-scale nano wires, we'd be gaining something like (wild ass guess) 20% gain in efficiency. 20% would be nice but would it really beat the last hundred years of discoveries? I don't think so, especially with digital tech's profound world-reshaping continuing to accelerate.

Specifically you could lay undersea superconducting cables around the world and rely on a global electrical grid which allows for nearly 100% solar generation.

Superconducting magnets become cheap and widely available which allows for maglev trains at massive scale. Costs for the LHC and similar experiments would drop dramatically. MRIs would only require air conditioning, if that; Modern cell phones are sufficient to compute tomography. Magnetic confinement fusion also becomes cheaper and easier. Electric cars could use superconducting motor magnets allowing for even greater power to weight ratios and efficiency.

Just a few things off the top of my non-mechanical-engineer head.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#59

Post by jakedata »

slashdev wrote: post #21

This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.

I was with them until I came across Figure D on page 7. It uses Comic Sans and calls the entire paper into question.

Please note: this comment is an attempt at humor. Various people seem to have a difficult time discerning humor or sarcasm and choose to downvote. It is also possible (but unlikely) that I am not funny.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#60

Post by danbruc »

barelyauser wrote: post #39
postmortembees wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it seems like (to me, a naive layperson) to be similar to how a prince rupert's drop exerts strong forces thanks to the mechanism of its cooling/shape. The copper somehow forcing other structures to form in an atypical way which enables the superconductivity. And even at 250mA, there'd be tons of different usecases for a superconductor.

It is not limited to 250mA overall. A physically larger specimen would be capable of more current.

I got this wrong, they also produced a thin film in addition to bulk material. And my worry was that one could maybe not easily scale this up in case the effect relied on it being a thin film in which case you can only make ever so wide before it becomes impractical or you have to layer or fold the thin film which might also be problematic. But as I said, I just read this wrong.
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