181–190 of 209 posts
A lot of other researchers close to this type of work have come out to say the same. Lots of materials are like that, simulation is still too approximate etc.
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Posting for Cunningham's law :) * Green energy suddenly becomes way more viable. Megaprojects in the most efficient sites can send energy long-distance and store it with effectively no loss, somewhat mitigating regional variations (especially if we have a high-trust world order where a united global grid is viable). (I read LK99 might have some limitations carrying lots of current but presumably other approaches woul…
Transmission losses aren't really a big problem for the grid. Cost, geopolitics, and resiliency matters more. I don't expect superconductors to change much here.
The whole "plate a desert with solar power and solve the world energy problems" doesn't work because the desert isn't where the power draw is. Superconductors hypothetically permit the African desert to supply Europe with power.
As this goes from science to engineering, we may find other issues with that plan, beyond the obvious expenses (for example, current limits can be handled with more wires, but if the current limit is sufficiently small that's still a problem, this is no solution if the superconducting bundle has a hundred square meter crosssection), but superconductors at least put it on the table. Conventional conductors do not.
Manifold markets jumped to ~40% likelihood (briefly around 60%) after this paper was published.
Out of curiosity, since this seems like a real inflection point toward trending in that direction, if it becomes increasingly likely that LK-99 or similar material is indeed a high-TC superconductor, what will savvy people be positioning themselves to do? What are good investments? What companies will be started, or what will existing companies be pivoting toward?
It's going to be a long time before it's put into use if this paper is correct. While it's exciting that a mechanism has been discovered (possibly), it seems to imply that the current method of synthesizing it is partially luck-based, and not very high quality. Of course, if we do understand how it works, lots of people will put lots of research into making a more reliable process, but it's going to take time. I'm no…
Man, I'm feeling stronger about LK-99 being it. This paper is theoretical and she finds that particular Cu substitutions onto specific Pb atomic sites are key to enabling a band structure that is usually linked to high Tc superconductors. What this means for the more practical minded is that the synthesis of superconducting LK-99 is not trivial and you need to make the appropriate substitutional alloy for this to wor…
If this could be simulated, can you help me understand why we couldn't have used simulation to find promising SC materials to investigate further earlier? Are there just too many permutations to investigate? It seems to my own naive self that if LK99 is the real deal, we mostly just got lucky finding it.
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If this material works out and EPA takes that stance, it will be the end of EPA. So they won’t take that stance.
If this material works out and also turns to be massively toxic, then people thinking the way you do is going to cause a lot of lead poisoning. Not fun.
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DFT scales horribly so it's phenomenally expensive to run. You have to have some other mechanism for knowing the general atomic layout before entering the DFT realm. Once you know the atomic positions you can then do little perturbation simulations to model phonon dispersions or ask electron density questions.
There are linear scaling DFT codes but they’re not available under open source licensing, only a strange license: https://onetep.org/
Linear scaling DFT is something way more impactful than room-temperature superconductors. What's next? "Hey, I've used my FTL spaceship to verify the material at those friendly alien's library"?
The fact that there has been no Nobel prize and we didn't spend a week around the web arguing "yes, it works!", "no, didn't work for me", "yes, I verified it!" highly implies that the site is trying to say something different than what we are understanding.
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I'm just saying that it's not really LK-99, then. It's something else that needs to be specified more precisely.
I'm not following you. The compound is specified, the process is what is poorly specified and the researchers more or less admit that they do not exactly know what the right method is. This makes it a lot harder to replicate and may well cause a lot of attempts to misfire before someone finds something that works or we give up on the search. What TFA here suggests is that there are some potential complications in man…
They found a new phenomenon, that took years to explain. They didn't do anything bad.
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Unfortunately the problem with electric aviation isn't the storage tech. Although having superconductors around would make the ground infrastructure nicer, if the current density limit works out.
Whats the problem with electric aviation?
Man, I'm feeling stronger about LK-99 being it. This paper is theoretical and she finds that particular Cu substitutions onto specific Pb atomic sites are key to enabling a band structure that is usually linked to high Tc superconductors. What this means for the more practical minded is that the synthesis of superconducting LK-99 is not trivial and you need to make the appropriate substitutional alloy for this to wor…
If this could be simulated, can you help me understand why we couldn't have used simulation to find promising SC materials to investigate further earlier? Are there just too many permutations to investigate? It seems to my own naive self that if LK99 is the real deal, we mostly just got lucky finding it.
People vastly over-estimate what we can simulate at any level of fidelity with any scale below purpose-built stuff running on supercomputers..