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LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

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Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35 thousand Kelvin in a "cold" nuclear fusion reactor is much closer to room temperature than the temperature in a "hot" nuclear fusion reactor. Both types of reactors do not produce excess energy, but the cold reactor has already found application while the hot reactor will be ready in 25 years. Which kind of reactor is hoax?

The cold reactor fuses nuclei by virtue of energy input , the other tries to extract energy from a fusion reaction larger than its input. On a complexity level you're looking at 1:10000 difference or worse.

Cold Fusion doesn't work because we are exchanging high-energy particles, which are expensive to produce, for low grade heat in bulk of material.

If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change equation. We can drop a tiny bit of Nickel lattice filled with Deuterium, and then strike it with muons from all angles, to create implosion. This will allow us to create tiny blast of hot plasma, which is much easier to extract energy from.

Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning". Type-I super conductors do not.

As far as I understand it (not an expert on these things), flux pinning is caused by microscopic defects that allow the magnetic field to penetrate at certain points. An idealized superconductor that is perfectly uniform expels the magnetic field at all points and so would not display the effect, it would simply be diamagnetic. So it’s mistaken and somewhat perverse to view the absence of flux pinning as proof that s…

That also explains - assuming it is all true - the lack of current through the sample.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#423
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. Wikipedia It works at near room temperature. The goal of the reactor in the video is to produce isotopes. It does the job.

It doesn't work anywhere near room temperature. Fusors operate at 10-30 keV, which is about 100 Million to 300 Million C. The plasma is extremely low density so there is very little power to heat things, and thus these units can safely run on a table top, but the temperature of the ions is enormous.

You are right, nuclear reactions requires enough enormous energy to overcome the barrier OR a heavy particles (muon). However, fusor works at room temperature. It doesn't require preheating to 150MK to start operation, like ITER do.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#424
post #38

It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?

In one of the notes it says > Red phosphorus cannot be obtained on short notice from a new customer in the USA due to DEA restrictions

"From a new customer" is the key phrase. This is only a serious issue for amateurs, not for real established labs.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#425
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data isn't good. They don’t have such a thing. They think they have such a thing. What they think they have is certainly interesting and potentially world changing, but if this (or some other reason like infighting over credit) lead them to rush publication, you have to be ready for the conclusion that whatever they have isn’t a superconductor as we know it.

This subthread is discussing whether it makes sense to have another lab validate the existing sample before we even try to follow their steps. Neither I nor the person you're responding to are assuming that the sample is what they claim it is, we're simply arguing that it doesn't matter how it was obtained—it's either a room temperature superconductor or it isn't, and if the researchers failed to document the process…

> but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?

This, from this subthread and directly from the comment I replied to, is what I was responding to. I don’t think I’ve missed some obvious point. I think you just misunderstood which topic I was responding to.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see, the apparatus didn't evaporate while working, so, probably, temperature is much lower.

Ordinary fusion reactors don't melt either, despite even hotter temperatures, so I don't think you're making the point that you think you are.

[deleted]

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you continue to say things that make no sense after it has been pointed out to you multiple times by multiple people? It's a bit strange, normally you'd realize your mistake and adapt, but you seem to persist in purposefully misunderstanding what it means when people talk about 'room temperature fusion'. Let me spell it out once more and then as far as I'm concerned we're done here. Room temperatu…

Temperature is statistics. Our bodies are penetrated by high-energy cosmic rays, but they do not change the room temperature. Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of thousands of nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-filled lattice, melting the metal, but it does not change the room temperature a lot. So, at what temperature do these reactions occur? On one hand, high energies are required to overcome the Coulomb barri…

> Temperature is statistics.

Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules in a substance, a measure of velocity.

> Our bodies are penetrated by high-energy cosmic rays, but they do not change the room temperature.

They in fact do. Every time a high-energy cosmic ray interacts with a particle in the room the room temperature goes up. The chances of that happening are small because from the perspective of such a ray space is very much empty. But some substances (such as water) are pretty good at absorbing those rays and that's part of the reason why hard radiation is risky for organisms.

> So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?

Those reactions, when they occur are more like traffic accidents. The impact results in the transfer of kinetic energy and will result in a 'shower' of particles emitting from the point of impact and some of those particles in turn will fragment (but slightly later). They will typically spray out from the impact point. Cloudchamber photographs can show you in nice detail what such interactions look like. So the question at which temperature those reactions occur doesn't really have meaning, each particle has it's own velocity and the end result is some photons emitted by the electrons of the excited particles and probably some new particles (think of them as fragments spraying out from a traffic accident).

> Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of thousands of nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-filled lattice, melting the metal, but it does not change the room temperature a lot.

I can't parse any of this. But you're going to have to trust me on the physics of electostatic confinement fusors: the losses are such that there is no known path to producing net energy through that method. You can fuse nuclei, and your link above is interesting but it doesn't change the fundaments at all, it is an optimization and a good one but it doesn't get you closer to 'net out' any more than being able to run the 100 meters in 5 seconds would get you closer to breaking the lightspeed barrier, or like how piling up bricks gets you closer to the moon with every brick but you will never get there.

> So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?

This is again not a very meaningful question, the answer is 'much higher than room temperature'. The interesting question would be: does it produce more energy than you put in and if not can it be improved so that it does and I'm afraid the answer is simply 'no'.

> LENR allows for the creation of a cold fusion reactor, that can be started at room temperature and operated at low temperature, unlike thermonuclear fusion reactor.

That's a novel interpretation of the words 'cold fusion', and uses 'low temperature' in a way that I'm not comfortable with, even if it stops short of getting into the millions of degrees.

> I mean that delay or absence of medical treatment caused lot of premature deaths in these 30 years. Progress saves lives. Delaying of progress reverses the process.

Nobody is delaying progress. Well, maybe except for those that would siphon off budget from legit science to pursue their pet fringe science subjects.

> As you see, private capital is not afraid about loss of scientific reputation.

And that's perfectly fine. Whoever manages to do this in their garage will win a Nobel anyway. But if you don't have an advanced physics degree the chances of you discovering a novel principle for fusion that leads to net energy out on your table top are nil, and if you do have that degree you are probably not much better off. If there was so much as a theoretical path to net energy out fusion that does not require many billions of $ you can bet that there would be people all over it, in fact I would wager that we would have already found it.

> IMHO, it will easier to get funding for LENR reactors when they break the ice.

Possible, but not likely, see above bit about breaking the speed of light.

> I was unable to find a funding for similar idea before the war.

That's not surprising, really. Investors tend to evaluate the risks.

> However, I may pursuit a different goal - a bluster (photon streams with watts of energy per single photon), to kick Russian drones out from the sky.

I wish you all the best with that. But do be aware that a single photon carries no more than 10^-19 Joules and that Watts are a measure of power, not of energy...). This makes me suspect that you know a lot less about this stuff than the confidence with which you present yourself warrants.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#428

Off topic: any tool to have a quick summarization like this? --- The blog post is about the discovery of a purported room-temperature-and-pressure (RTP) superconductor, labeled "LK-99". The discovery was announced in two papers published on arxiv.org on July 22, 2023. The first paper, which was short and seemed hastily written, had three authors: Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon. The second paper was more…

The kagi universal summarizer has been pretty descent on my end. But I've only lightly tested it on two pages.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#429

Note that the original table has been more recently updated: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

Ok, I guess we'd better switch to that from https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor... (the submitted URL). Thanks!

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#430
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you silently assume that samples aren't being shared around as we speak? CMTC of the University of Maryland stated that the authors are cooperating in regards to this https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 There's value in both validating existing samples and producing new ones.

Oh that would be great! Sorry if my assumption is mistaken. I'd love this to be real! I'm not just thinking about this last week, though - if the LK group had these samples for multiple years, it seems like they would have been able to share & convince at least one PhD to support them publicly. The fact that they haven't just seems weird! Sure, they were preparing the papers, etc. etc but you do have to balance that…

>it seems like they would have been able to share & convince at least one PhD to support them publicly. The fact that they haven't just seems weird!

Isn't that Hyun-Tak Kim of William & Mary?

https://www.wm.edu/as/physics/people/researchfaculty/kim_h.p...

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