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Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

arxiv.org

161–170 of 209 posts

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#161
post #124

Dumb question: why all the fuss ? I have checked a bit on the web but I fail to grasp the practical consequences of it (I mean if LK99 is the thing)). Could someone explain what could be done with that material ? For example, if we can transport electricity with a super conductor over long dsitances (1000 of kms), then what happens ? Is it just an incremental progress or is it a huge breakthrough ? (I am not much tra…

Huge breakthrough. Energy efficiency is just one gain. This also potentially unlocks major gains in quantum computing, fusion energy, tradition computer chip design allowing another 30 years of moore’s law, batteries with zero energy loss leading to ultra dense batteries and electric aviation

We'll have only part of that because this is lead based. Lead free regulation is the law of the land in many places and it's getting tighter. We spent decades finding out how absolutely harmful lead is to humans.

Only the industrial sector could claim exceptions but would still need to comply with safe cleanup and disposal.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#162

There's a lot of optimism in this thread, but does DFT (or any theoretical model really) actually have much predictive value in quantum chemistry? I've always gotten the impression that in this field the proof is in the pudding.

GGA-DFT (+ some corrections) used here seems quite ok to me for this system. For more trust into this, I would like similar calculations with other methods to see how similar or different they are. LDA-DFT will most likely not be great (as in most cases), but I would be very interested in some DFT+GW calculations, even though LK99 might not be it's strength.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#163
post #2

"However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample" OK I'm starting to actually believe that LK-99 might be the real deal.

Can anyone explain what this means in relation to the ability to synthesize it in superconducting form? Is there a way to force the Cu to the correct site? Or is looking for a new material with similar properties the way forward

I'm not an expert on chemistry but it sounds like this would make it ridiculously hard to obtain a high quality sample. Copper can substitute for either lead site; I'm not aware of macroscopic processes that would favor one over the other. Problems like that are usually handled ad hoc. The authors seem to have bumped and shuffled their way there through the darkness.

For context, the preparation of tetrataenite was pursued for decades (first partial success October 2022) even though the structure was well-known and the constituents are just nickel and iron.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#164

I really hope this unlocks a class of superconductors and isn't a bizarre oneoff compound, because the EPA of 2023 is not going to let us wire the country with thousands of miles of lead-based ceramic wire.

We have an entire class of amazing fluorocarbon materials, and the EPA didn’t do anything about it. And now it appears that may have been somewhat of a mistake.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sooo, a 770 GHz processor? Do I understand it correctly? Jesus.

If using that flip-flop, whole processor will be closer to 100ghz (typically there are multiple transistors which need to stabilise before you have a result of computation). But probably those superconductors could enable even faster transistors and maybe we could get 1THz processors.

I suspect you'd still need very low temperatures to make this work, even with a high temperature superconductor: low temperatures reduce thermal noise, which may be an issue at such time scales (unless you pump a lot of energy per bit, which means high voltages (limits scaling) or current/capacitances (also limits scaling).

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#166
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been covered in every thread about this stuff so far, maybe read those other threads first and then be more specific?

I admit I didn't read all the threads in detail. I'll give it another try :-)

Especially the first two threads (I think those have the highest scores for "superconductor" on HN).

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks similar to the protein folding problem. Maybe an AlphaFold-like approach could work?

We exactly considering this since this year. But there are some major problems that cannot be solved in short term. Inorganic crystal structure database (and there is one database literally this name) is way smaller than what we have for proteins. Also by nature, Transformer is hardly useful for crystals because the crystal is repetitive. You don't throw the same sequence over and over to transformer and hope it will…

GNNs and graph transformers are the current state of the art methods for this kind of crystal property prediction task. One drawback is that they don’t seem to capture long range structure all that well, and the current generative models (which are really cool) based on GNNs don’t seem to take advantage of symmetry that well

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#168
post #23

It's funny to read all those grammatical mistakes in the abstract. They are probably just not native English speakers, but to me it sounds like they were frantically typing the paper as soon as they finally got results after a 20 hour lab marathon and way too much caffeine. :D

From her wikipedia page, Sinéad Griffin is an Irish physicist, so she seems a native English speaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_Griffin

I wanted to comment on a paper by some different group. It's confusing with all those papers floating around on HN.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#169
A few comments.

1) This is simulation result using density functional theory. While a standard method for understanding the electronic structure of materials it often does not do so accurately when correlations (electronic interactions) are strong. In this kind of context (where strong interactions are expected to be necessary to give something like high temperature superconductivity) what one is looking for from a DFT simulation is an indication of what kind of starting point to extend further and include interactions.

2) What is seen here are features called "flat bands". Essentially, the kinetic energy of the electrons relevant at low energies is only weakly dependent on the (crystal) momentum of the particle. Having lots of different states (different momenta) at similar energy usually means the interactions are more important than in materials where the kinetic energy is larger and more dispersive (depends more strongly on momentum). Here the partially filled d-shells of the Cu atoms appear to make a flat band at low energy. This flat band is partially filled and thus is potentially susceptible to interaction induced instabilities.

3) Flat bands can come from trivial features of a crystal as well. If you've got isolated atoms far apart enough that their atomic orbitals barely overlap their bands will be flat. Some of this may be at play here since the Cu atoms seem to be quite distant (7-9 Angstroms or so).

4) Flat bands appear in many many kinds of systems (at the level of DFT, even at the level of experiments, etc, etc) and do not necessarily imply superconductivity, let alone high temperature superconductivity. Even if the presence of flat bands is pointing towards stronger and more important interaction effects these interaction effects can stabilize other kinds of order instead (magnetism, charge order, etc).

5) Predicting what instability is realized is hard and can be quite delicate. There are materials where this can be debated (theoretically and sometimes experimentally) for years. Predicting the onset temperature of the order that is produced is hard. I.e. Don't necessarily expect a reliable estimate of the critical temperature from theory.

Re: Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99

#170
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but how does one create a transistor from a superconductor? Maybe I’m missing something here.

Most superconducting logic families aren't using transistors at all. They use Josephson junctions, which are just two pieces of superconductor separated by a non-supercondutor. RSFQ (Rapid Single Flux Quantum) uses millivolt-high picosecond-long pulses to represent logic 1 and their absence as logic zero, instead of using voltage level as in CMOS. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/783712 (770 GHz toggle flip-flop…

Are you aware of any obvious issues with manufacturing Josephson junctions using photolithography? Like, would switching to an LK-99 or similar set us back to the 70s in terms of wafer density/size?
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