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Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

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Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#241

Post by dllthomas »

akjssdk wrote: post #54
mmastrac wrote: post #12

This is an extremely useful summarization of the original paper. > 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…

I don't think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper. It is much easier to prove that this is superconducting than to prove why. And in a sense it is a bit less relevant. Although developing a working theory for room temperature is also probably worth a Nobel prize, so I am willing to bet some theorists are also running to their blackboards as we speak.

Do we know whether the mechanism was proposed before or after observing the results? If they found the material because of the theory, then I think it's very relevant.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#242

Post by babypuncher »

IshKebab wrote: post #151
hughw wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e.g. What keeps bicycles balanced with or without a rider is still an active area of research, and even the seemingly basic idea that, for a bicycle to be self-stable, it needs to turn the handlebars into the fall, has not yet been proven. [*] https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

"Active area of research" is quite different to "we don't know how they work". We know how they work. We might not have fully characterised the stability conditions , but that's not the same thing.

I think their point still stands, even if "we don't know how bikes work" is a flowery exaggeration.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#243

Post by jacquesm »

gus_massa wrote: post #136
mrguyorama wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also probably a hundred labs skipping over replication completely to try and beat someone else out on a random permutation of these materials and methods and hoping to get lucky.

Yes, "replication" in this experiments usualy means foloeing the oficial recipe and many small variants. 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.)

> but a new record a few degrees hotter is easy

Assuming one exists. Assuming it is real.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#244

Post by hcks »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #192

Raise your hand if you contacted Aldritch about the two pre-cursor materials :-) 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.

Don’t waste your time, it’ll be disproved 10 times before your reactants get delivered.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#245

Post by overnight5349 »

floxy wrote: post #4

Lots of people are saying there should be a quick turnaround time here for trying the replication. I wonder how much it would cost to try and replicate this, in materials, labor costs, and vacuum furnace time/costs. My naive thought is that that labs in general aren't just going to drop everything to try an replicate every instance of someone declaring they've discovered room temperature superconductivity. Seems more…

The synthesis outlined in the paper takes about 90 hours, but basically all of it is just waiting for the material to bake in a furnace.

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.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#246

Post by abrichr »

tigershark wrote: post #166
tux3 wrote: post #137

New scientist got a reply from the authors and a few other experts: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384782-room-temperatur... >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 seco…

“Both papers present similar measurements” 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 n…

> the video of lk-99 levitating above a magnet demonstrating the Meissner effect

Can you please provide a link?

Edit: found it https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#247

Post by zbobet2012 »

ortusdux wrote: post #87
eig wrote: post #17

This video ( https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n ) showing the Meissner effect should be the easiest to replicate: just send a sample to another lab and put it over a large magnet. 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)!

That video reminds me of the way pyrolytic graphite floats on strong magnets. https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/pyrolytic_graphi... https://youtu.be/Wk3seHNmNs8

As far as I am aware you need multiple magnets to make this happen, just one will cause it to "fall" off. In the video it's just one magnet, and it doesn't try to "slide" away when it's moved past the edge of the magnet. That's a strong indicator of quantum locking.

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...

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#248

Post by dkqmduems »

aeternum wrote: post #236
ummonk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. There's nothing incomplete about our model for lift on airplanes.

Oh really, so why do the Navier-Stokes equations work?

Conservation of momentum?

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#249

Post by [deleted] »

local_issues wrote: post #78
akjssdk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper. It is much easier to prove that this is superconducting than to prove why. And in a sense it is a bit less relevant. Although developing a working theory for room temperature is also probably worth a Nobel prize, so I am willing to bet some theorists are also running to their blackboards as we speak.

Ding ding ding! We still don't know how bikes work, we have a pretty good but incomplete model for lift on airplanes, and no one has the faintest why Tylenol works. 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/new…

[deleted]

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#250

Post by hinkley »

mthomasmw wrote: post #88
local_issues wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding! We still don't know how bikes work, we have a pretty good but incomplete model for lift on airplanes, and no one has the faintest why Tylenol works. 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/new…

Do you have a link handy for "we don't know how bikes work" ?

As a bit of an aside, most people don't know how bicycle wheels work. There's a whole section in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicycle_Wheel that talks about how they actually work. It's not tension at the top, it's compression on the bottom.
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