Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 821 posts

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#311

Post by cpleppert »

codeulike wrote: post #161
digdugdirk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it. i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity. Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods. As for why we…

Would help with fusion, right?

If this pans out fusion energy would be completely viable with enough investment. Right now tokamaks don't really have a pathway to being commercially viable and are basically 40 years away. For starters, If you can cut the cost by 2-4x you are right in the ballpark of what you would need to build a working tokamak fusion power plant. You would need to do better than that for fusion to be a viable power source but tokamak fusion was always only a magnitude away unlike other hypothetical fusion energy alternatives.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#312

Post by radioactivist »

gaze wrote: post #80
scythe wrote: post #18

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who thought that the DFT computational preprints were very promising. Unfortunately, they also indicate that the desired substitution will be very hard to achieve — crucially, the "crush and separate the composite" suggestion a few commenters have made is unlikely to work, since the heterogeneity exists within the same crystal, depending on whether Cu substitutes into Pb {1}…

Kinda? You'd expect flat bands from putting a copper atom into a big insulating supercell. The population of the d band is interesting, though. I don't find it super super compelling, but it's certainly not nothing.

Yes, given the Cu atoms seem to be ~8 Angstrom apart the flat bands are to be expected. So its not clear what "special" about these, given if you just had dilute Cu impurities in some otherwise insulating I'd imagine you'd have something similar for the Cu d-bands.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#314

Post by allenrb »

shin_lao wrote: post #164
Ajay-p wrote: post #19

I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?

Superconductor are more efficient at transmitting energy, here are some consequences: - Cheaper electricity transportation - New kind of batteries - Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them - Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper - Probably lots of things we can't even think of If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do indus…

> - Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them

And now I’m imagining a superconducting toaster. Such frustration!

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#315

Post by greggsy »

elteto wrote: post #259
hinkley wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).

It took 80 years to go from a crude prototype at Bell Labs to Apple announcing the M1. We just need to know it’s possible. The rest will follow.

The M1 is just as significant as an ESP32 or Celeron in the scheme of things.

Isn’t the introduction of the 4004 in 1971 a better comparison? while that was still 24 years since the Bell labs discovery, we have much better scientific, manufacturing, logistical and mining ecosystems within industry and research today.

If there’s a compelling reason to do so, governments will find ways to accelerate the development of those ecosystems from decades to years (probably more like a decade).

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#316

Post by failuser »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #226
kijin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly doesn't hurt that this thing levitates . No need to squint into a microscope, parse a screen full of numbers, or try to make sense of false-color renderings. Either you have video proof of a levitating object, or you don't. The demonstration is as intuitive as it gets, despite the fact that the theory is crazy difficult to wrap one's head around.

Levitates? Against, what, the earth's inherent magnetic field? Sorry, I haven't seen any visuals that show this behavior.

Levitation in magnetic itself is not the proof. Frogs can do that too, ask Geim. The proof would be levitation in any orientation.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#317

Post by nwiswell »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #295
themagician wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫

People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.

It would be sub-10%* gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy.

ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets):

Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 Similarly for Au we would have Pb[10−x]Au[x](PO4)[6]O. Taking the centerpoint x=1, this becomes Pb[9]Au[1](PO4)[6]O. In other words, there would be one gold atom for every 9 lead atoms.

The "unit cell weight" is 2647.59 g/mol, and the molar mass of gold is 196.97 g/mol, so in fact the hypothetical gold weight content is about 7.44%, not sub-1%.

That said -- presumably superconducting transmission wires would be thinner than the ones we are used to (a function of critical current rather than resistance). So I'm not sure that we'd have a theft problem worse than we already have with copper.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#318

Post by amluto »

hinkley wrote: post #153
SanderNL wrote: post #21

This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure. Good luck to all involved. I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.

I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).

The effective cross-sectional area of the original sample could well be minuscule. (I assume that, if a room temperature superconductor has been found, it constitutes a tiny fraction of the sample.)

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#319

Post by titzer »

hinkley wrote: post #153
SanderNL wrote: post #21

This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure. Good luck to all involved. I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.

I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).

The current is related to the cross-sectional area of the (super)conductor. Not sure how big their sample was, but the solution is thicker and more cables.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#320

Post by ajuc »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #295
themagician wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫

People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.

Computer components already have gold in them, and they are already recycled for gold.
Post reply on HN