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

I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 135 posts

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#121

Post by abreidenbach »

rbanffy wrote: post #71
darkwater wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties. But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons…

I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler ma…

Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#123

Post by jandrewrogers »

abreidenbach wrote: post #120
jandrewrogers wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast copper-producing region of the US has large areas of similar mineralization. If they found it in the Atacama then you can find it in the US as well.

You sure can! Small amounts have been confirmed in Arizona. I wouldn’t be surprised if deposits were quite extensive. Over 10 different confirmed locations worldwide. See the Mindat page on herbertsmithite if you’re curious

Good shout for Mindat, I should have searched that immediately (I use it for other things).

Looking at the chemical structure it is a supergene mineral but what makes it unique is that it has zinc without the metals that normally associated with zinc in these deposits. That is an unusual elemental configuration. It seems like a thing you could model but it isn’t surprising that no one has because it wouldn’t have a use in mining.

The places where you would find this ore may not be in places with commercially viable deposit scale as a copper play, especially if it is mostly copper-zinc. The US west is littered with concentrated micro-deposits of diverse copper minerals but no one maps them in a serious way.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#124

Post by vi_sextus_vi »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #54
zeusdclxvi wrote: post #4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_spin_liquid Neat

The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.

At a quick glance, I did not see the term "collapsed" in wiki. It isn't a collapse. (The concept is still relevant[0]!)

What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.

Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)

[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#125

Post by vi_sextus_vi »

MisterTea wrote: post #105
jerojero wrote: post #41

I was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%). I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, i…

I had a Chilean coworker who earned his degree in molecular biology while in Chile. He emigrated to the US (sometime in the early-mid 90's) as he claimed there was little opportunity for scientists in Chile. He worked a basic job that paid the bills while he built up a side business exporting appliances secretly stuffed with gun parts. He was able to retire back to Chile on that money.

I am the submitter and I am sorry for leaving out, indeed, dismissing the core contribution of the Chilean anthropologists and geologists. The author wouldn't have approved of my editorialising.

I am only slightly relieved that HN have bubbled up a conversation about the self-reinforcing north-south divide in "cultural wealth" instead of making it even more exploitative than it was

Your friend's contribution to the cultural wealth of Chile is ironic. Maybe (some) Southies now have a better (non-fungible/modular) understanding of precision machining, gun-metallurgy or even biochemistry compared to their NorAm counterparts because of his actions.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#126

Post by vi_sextus_vi »

tomaskafka wrote: post #51
jerojero wrote: post #41

I was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%). I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, i…

You described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

>As of at least 2023, there is no academic consensus on the effect of resource abundance on economic development[4]

Interesting. Do Japanese, and now Dutch, planners think they are free of the resource blessing?

[4] Alssadek, Marwan; Benhin, James (2023). "Natural resource curse: A literature survey and comparative assessment of regional groupings of oil-rich countries".

>For instance, the oil sector frequently requires technical solutions to improve offshore oil drilling. This might create positive knowledge externalities to support other sectors. If these sectors trade with the oil boom sector in the economy, then learning-by-doing spill-overs in the overall economy are expected. In this scenario, the implications of the Dutch disease would not be evident, and natural resources may in fact be a blessing rather than a curse.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#127

Post by dietr1ch »

cogman10 wrote: post #45
jerojero wrote: post #41

I was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%). I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, i…

That's actually a bit wild that Chile isn't refining or smelting copper. Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters? I thought Chili had a pretty abundant energy grid (mostly hydro as I recall).

> Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters?

Most mines are in the north, but the hydro capacity is far from them in the south. That's one challenge, but to me doesn't explain why. Chile nationalised copper with aims to develop our industry, but then the US decided to sabotage our democracy.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#128

Post by abreidenbach »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #123
abreidenbach wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure can! Small amounts have been confirmed in Arizona. I wouldn’t be surprised if deposits were quite extensive. Over 10 different confirmed locations worldwide. See the Mindat page on herbertsmithite if you’re curious

Good shout for Mindat, I should have searched that immediately (I use it for other things). Looking at the chemical structure it is a supergene mineral but what makes it unique is that it has zinc without the metals that normally associated with zinc in these deposits. That is an unusual elemental configuration. It seems like a thing you could model but it isn’t surprising that no one has because it wouldn’t have a u…

What metals normally associate with Zinc? Isn’t copper a pretty normal associate? There’s a lot of sulphates, silicon, silver, iron, etc in other minerals at this mine too

And yeah, it could be a lot of undiscovered places as a supergene mineral. The ones I found were right next to an industrial sized heap mine though. A lot of Chile’s more recent mining efforts target supergene minerals. That’s also why it was measured though…

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#129

Post by abreidenbach »

mgaunard wrote: post #6
rbanffy wrote: post #2

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits. It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

I was literally thinking ancient civilizations/aliens throughout the whole article.

[dead]

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#130

Post by abreidenbach »

pimlottc wrote: post #101

I just want to say, kudos to the author for the excellent captions. So many articles include images with no captions whatsoever and expect the reader to somehow just know what they're looking at. Even when it's pretty obvious, it never hurts to state it plainly with a short caption.

[dead]
Post reply on HN