181–190 of 906 posts
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Superconducting power transmission cables solves the power storage problem of renewable energy sources. We'd just make a global energy grid, and the sunny side powers the dark side.
That won't save us. Not unless you know how to build it in the next 5 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36836722
Joking aside, besides power transmission, what other obvious things can this tech be used for?
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No, I agree with you that a quiet “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please reproduce or tell us if you find something we've misinterpreted”, rather than a public fanfare, is how a potential scientific breakthrough should be done IMO. I think I cross-pollinated this thread with another where someone was asking “if this is true why isn't it on the front pages”. The extraordinary evidence I'd wa…
But this is exactly the quiet please reproduce? It's a preprint posted to arxiv, with a very easy to follow material synthesis process in the supplemental materials section?
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Superconductors are basically perfectly conductive wire. Wires that transfer 100% of power over arbitrary distances and that don't heat up. Obviously there are limits, you can't put arbitrary power over a hair thin filament but as long as you're under that limit you get perfect efficiency. MRI machines can be made a lot simpler as you no longer need to use liquid nitrogen to cool the superconductors. MRI machines cou…
A note about MRI machines: they use liquid helium, not liquid nitrogen. LN2 isn't cold enough. Being able to eliminate liquid helium would be huge, as helium is scarse and quite expensive. Its roughly 10x the cost of LN2 and only going to get more expensive.
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Can someone ELI5 to those of us who aren't even sure what a superconductor is?
A material with no electrical resistance. Build a wire out of it and the voltage will be the same on both ends.
Great for energy transmission (though you can't put too much current, superconductivity breaks down under strong fields).
Great for fast circuits, such as CPUs, that don't waste energy just transmitting data.
Great for storing energy (in principle) by just making a loop and let current flow indefinitely.
Related, great for building powerful magnets (that are just such a loop) without wasting too much energy. Applications: MRI machines (they already use superconductors but are bulky due to the need for cooling) and other powerful magnets: LHC/particle accelerators, Tokamaks/plasma control/fusion. But also improved motors and generators.
Nice for levitating stuff since they levitate above magnets "for free" (due to their interaction with electrical fields, they reject magnetic fields). Possible applications for maglev (trains, etc), magnetic bearings, etc.
And possibly a lot of new applications opened up if you remove the need for cooling (Faraday cages?).
Of course, it all depends on how much current and temperature it can handle. But if this is real, just having one material is game-changing, and it will surely be improved upon by looking for similar properties in other materials. This one contains lead, which is a non-starter for a lot of applications due to its toxicity.
Someone else wrote a few use-cases in that other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36866686
This is an unlisted video of the LK-99 film (purportedly)
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Unlike those guys in Rochester, this seems to be a good experiment that is testing many of the signs of superconductivity.
The actual picture of (poor) levitation in the paper you linked is pretty compelling. This isn’t a complex, noisy measurement showing something that’s related to superconductivity — this is a magnet and a supposed superconductor repelling each other. As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t noti…
ETA: the video referenced is apparently available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k . Interestingly, posted on Feb 26, 2023.
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That won't save us. Not unless you know how to build it in the next 5 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36836722
^Soyjacks pointing^ Joking aside, besides power transmission, what other obvious things can this tech be used for?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36867709
Needless to say, this would be game-changing. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence etc, let's be cautiously optimistic here.
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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 belie…
big if true. far from a chemistry expert here, but synthesis looks basically trivial (if you consider 10e-5 torr vacuum to be trivial), and the materials are readily available. hell, from the instructions alone i could probably make it at home. i mean the search space is unfathomably large, so i suppose it’s possible that something like this exists, but the paper quality itself doesn’t.. spark joy? :) i’ll maintain a…
I've looked briefly at the materials synthesis (first part of their Supplementary Materials section). I agree with you, the synthesis is trivial. The 10e-5 vacuum is easily reached with a turbopump backed by a mechanical pump, nothing exotic or expensive.