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The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

arxiv.org

171–180 of 906 posts

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

#171
post #140
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular evidence will suffice. If people can make the material and levitate a small permanent magnet above the sample at room temperature, that will be sufficient.

"Extraordinarily" may mean here "reproduced in 100 laboratories consistently", beyond any doubt.

>"reproduced in 100 laboratories consistently"

That's a pretty high bar. Everyone has their own threshold of skepticism, but if NREL announced next week that they followed the recipe and it was superconducting at room temperature, I'd be willing to bet money on it being real.

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

#172

The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals). If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days. If this is real, it'll change society quickly and perman…

Does anyone in the twin cities area want to pair up and try to make this? Might be a fun group project.

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

#175
post #158
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think not just maglev: a lot of typical bearings could possibly be switched from ball / roll to maglev, saving a lot on friction and maintenance. Undersea cables are a pie in the sky; current high-load cables in urban an industrial areas could be made much smaller, simpler, and lossless. I wonder if transformers, currently huge and expensive, could be made better with this, too; at least the ohmic losses could be r…

Why would you need transformers if you can send it losslessly?

Because, even in a superconductor, current density isn't unlimited.

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

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

#176
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind." Hell of a way to end a paper.

Can someone ELI5 to those of us who aren't even sure what a superconductor is?

When you cool some materials down until they are very cold, something weird happens: Their electrical resistance vanishes, and they start rejecting all magnetic fields. It's important to note that this is not a continuous process where things slowly change until it reaches zero, it is a step change after which everything related to electricity works very differently.

This doesn't mean there is no resistance in the wires that move electricity to your house, because superconductors only work when cooled to unpractically low temperatures, meaning they can only be used for special things like the magnets in MRI machines and fusion reactors.

That is, until now. This paper reports on a material that remains a superconductor at 127C.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People use the same stupid argument when commenting on quantum computer. But in case of QC, one is powerful enough to compute everything and we might not even need two, except for spare. Say a 1000 qubits QC exist, Work that it can do is the sum of all computering power in human history. You cannot even verify if the result is right or not because simply you don't have any classical alternative for that workload.

> But in case of QC, one is powerful enough to compute everything and we might not even need two, except for spare. Say a 1000 qubits QC exist, Work that it can do is the sum of all computering power in human history. You cannot even verify if the result is right or not because simply you don't have any classical alternative for that workload.

A 1000-qubit QC can't break a RSA-2048 key, let alone a lot of other interesting tasks. Quantum computers aren't magical things that provide exponential speedups on absolutely everything; they can only provide exponential speedups on some algorithms, and those algorithms generally require linear numbers of qubits to the problem size, so 1000 qubits is greatly limiting to problem size.

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

#178
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass produce as many receivers you want and don't launch the ad-hoc satellite. How useful are the receivers?

I believe receiver use same tech as transmitter. When you have one, you must have the counterpart.

> I believe receiver use same tech as transmitter.

The hard problem solved by satellites is getting the satellite in orbit and getting it to stay there.

Humanity already could send radio waves across the planet. Emitter and receiver is not the hard problem.

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

#179
A sister paper [0] has a photo of the material exhibiting the Meisner effect and levitating over a magnet, and claims to have a video too.

Either they blatantly photoshopped the photo or they actually made a room temperature super conductor. I can’t see how the could have made a subtle mistake that resulted in magnetic levitation at room temp without making a superconductor.

[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037

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

#180
post #76
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind." Hell of a way to end a paper.

If iron was worth naming an era after this will be.

But they've trademarked the name KL-99 (®) in their follow-up paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf

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