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 the thought that there might be some guy in a garage 5 miles from you replicating this baffle you?
Read this comment thread from SC researchers: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/comment/... Lots of problems with the paper, they claim. It is not up to the standards of current SC research. One of them says Dias's work shows more merit than this.
All valid points but just below that comment someone asked if he/she was reading the new paper (apparently there's an older paper), he/she didn't respond/haven't responded yet.
One catch would be the use of lead would restrict the use cases fairly heavily
If you think lead is scary, wait till you hear about carbon dioxide.
If you think carbon dioxide is scary, wait for your cup of Pepsi.
(Low toxicity of CO2 is actually one of the reasons it is not treated seriously enough).
What do you suppose the odds are that there's a Tin-based compound instead of lead based? (Which would effectively make a bizarre form of brass a superconductor)
I doubt this one chemistry will be all that useful on practice. But after people understand it, I expect them to recreate the effect with completely different components, not on just slightly different ones.
Not really, cuprates have been the standard for high Tc superconductors since 1986 and nobody could replace them with easier to work with materials.
> we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) I'll say, for "room temperature", that's certainly no room I'd want to be in.
that's the max temp beyond which it loses superconductivity, not a requirement. The paper has a graph of max current vs temp, and it gets vastly better at actual room temp of ~300k
As someone who doesn't follow superconductors, what sorts of things about life/engineering/society would change, how dramatic would it be, and more importantly: which stocks would you pick :)
The direct impact could be relatively limited, at least for a while. Having a room-temperature superconductor is really awesome, but existing high-temperature superconductors are fragile and expensive. You can make motors, electromagnets, and power grids with much better efficiency—but that’s not so useful if the parts break when you look at them wrong. You’ll still get better magnets and sensors, probably. Maybe eve…
Sensors could be huge I think, even with a material that's a total dud in terms of the superconductor power revolution. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a range of novel sensor approaches that haven't really been explored due to the practicality threshold of low temperature superconductivity.