261–270 of 361 posts
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What's impressive to me is how simple making it is. There are still low hanging scientific discoveries that are out there but that we haven't figured out yet.
Like ancient Roman concrete.
Can someone with field expertise explain the implications if this material were real / replicable / cheaply manufacturable? I see a lot of breathless excitement in these comments, as if free energy and perpetual motion machines are right around the corner, but from the few details I've delved into it's more like the electric grid might get 10% more efficient, MRIs might get a little cheaper, etc. What are the excitin…
Transmission loss is a real and important reason why you can't, say, cover the Sahara with solar panels to get unlimited free energy for mainland Europe and Africa (barring all the logistical challenges of actually pulling something like that off). This is because you lose a significant amount of energy just by moving it from one place to another. With RTP superconductors, you get near perfect transmission from the s…
Short summary (not a physicist and consume most of my science in English, so may be slightly wrong):
- The material is fragile, and hard to form into a regular shape
- There's a weird drop in resistance around 230K; could be an artefact of the measurement process or instrument
- On 1 Aug they found a sample with almost 0 resistance, which got them really excited and led to them searching for more
- They tested 6 samples, only one of which exhibited zero resistance at below 110K
Basically, results are inconclusive, but it's promising.
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I guess that you can thank the DEA for this specific case…
The Drug Enforcement Administration? What does that have to do with physics?
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>At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here. I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very dif…
> I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially. That's kinda how science goes. The first free-electron laser was built in 1971. It took decades to develop and commercialize free-electron lasers and we still in the early days. It is rare for a single discovery to re…
The idea originated with Einstein in the middle of WWI, and it took until 1960 for the first working device to be made with lots of incremental progress in the middle. After that it's been a non-stop series of inventions each of which gave rise to new practical applications and new avenues of search. Originally described as 'a solution looking for a problem' it turned out that indeed, it was the solution to a lot of problems, we just didn't realize how applicable this tech would be.
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Assuming they discovered a low cost, room temperature, room pressure, superconductor, there are many HUGE technological advancements that can be made that would impact your daily life. Possibilities include improved battery longevity in all devices(probably in an order of magnitude), low friction transport improvements (ie. cheaper high speed rail), and faster and higher bandwidth wired connections. https://en.wikipe…
No I mean why is this "huge" when each time that's happened it's been deflated within 12 hours: - initial LK-99 paper upload on Arxiv: HUGE, then it's probably nothing until replication (waiting) - DFT release: HUGE, then probably nothing (DFT has poor predictive power) - 110K SC: HUGE, then ... ? In every case it's been the laymen saying HUGE, then the experts saying it's probably insignificant. Then the laymen sett…
As someone with experience working on superconductors, the DFT results and this paper are exciting because they show that at the very least this is likely a new class of superconducting materials at least as good as the current industrial ones. Knowing that the authors are on to something and that the initial claims aren't totally nuts is exciting and fun to post about, but it'll take time to be sure about any of this.
This is my first comment on this material, because I've been skeptical, but this result shouldn't be understated. It basically confirms the existence of a new family of high-temperature superconductors, the first of its kind since the cuprates in 1986. And for context, in the initial paper on the cuprates the critical temperature was measured to be 36 K. By synthesising other members of the cuprate family and optimis…
Why are all these materials confirmations coming from Chinese speaking scientists? Do scientists in the US not do materials science so much?
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When NileRed puts the YBCO on top of the row of bar magnets and it ping-pongs back and forth is awesome! Timestamp: https://youtu.be/RS7gyZJg5nc?t=2496
The best thing about the NileRed superconductor video is it shows him initially failing to reproduce a YBCO superconductor after having already succeeded once before! It goes to show how difficult manufacture, or in the case of the LK-99 news cycle “reproduction”, of these materials really is, and YBCO was a well documented area of superconductor manufacture.
To me this is encouraging. 110K is really high! It's higher than YBCO which is what they make commercial "high temperature" superconducting tape out of. IMO if this is legit (I have no way of judging the source) then this is the first good third party evidence that the original researchers are not just doing some kind of fraud. A total fraud wouldn't have actually discovered a novel high-temperature, but not room tem…