The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? • Hacker News Board

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#141

Post by LinAGKar » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #102

telltruth wrote: post #71

Could someone explain why is this world changing?

Superconductors change every assumption about how we harness electricity and magnetism. Beyond reducing the cost of electricity transmission, they enable all sorts of fascinating applications: - They enable low cost, continuous, passively-stable magnetic levitation. Superconductors could replace ball bearings in many applications. - They enable permanent magnets that are far stronger than any we make from conventiona…

Something that immediately comes to mind for me in Sweden, is that the country is fairly long in latitude, and most of our electricity production is from hydroelectric power in the northern half of the country, while most of the population is in the southern half of the country. Better energy transmission could help a lot.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#142

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #134

bilsbie wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of energy density could we get using it for energy storage? Maybe it’s competitive with batteries if you don’t need any cooling?

Superconductors are a transferring energy technology, not a storing energy technology. Although they would likely augment the efficiency of storage technologies.

They can be used to store energy, though they're pretty terrible at it for all but specialized applications.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#143

Post by fellowniusmonk » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #42

danbruc wrote: post #31

After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bit less legitimate to me and they could of course always have some error in there setup. The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the…

Word is one of the most common tools for writing papers. There was a study a while back that looked at the quality of Word or Latex papers. The study found that researchers using Word were more effective, and the working theory that explained it was that people who focused on the research did better research, and people focusing on the typesetting do better typesetting.

Latex is a waste of human potential.

I've done professional typesetting and cataloging with QuarkXPress and InDesign both and it was extremely fast, that's for professional high quality publishing. .doc and .md is fine for information first publishing.

Latex is not simple and is in my opinion just a big nerd snipe, its the intrusive thought of layout software, for humanities sake we'd be better off with simpler tools like markdown + math notation and if latex had been never invented.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#144

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

postmortembees wrote: post #124

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superconductors change every assumption about how we harness electricity and magnetism. Beyond reducing the cost of electricity transmission, they enable all sorts of fascinating applications: - They enable low cost, continuous, passively-stable magnetic levitation. Superconductors could replace ball bearings in many applications. - They enable permanent magnets that are far stronger than any we make from conventiona…

What if your PC did not need cooling, because it generated no heat? How much more potent could computers be?

It probably wouldn't greatly affect the heat generation in a PC, unless the transistors could themselves be replaced with some superconducting alternative. Harnessing the efficiency from that would probably require that the computer be designed as a reversible computer. It would be its own research avenue.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#145

Post by amluto » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #53

sheepscreek wrote: post #48

One of the authors in a related paper[1] is Hyun-Tak Kim. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals[2]. One even has > 1500 citations[3]. I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon. 1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O show…

Unlike those guys in Rochester, this seems to be a good experiment that is testing many of the signs of superconductivity.

The actual picture of (poor) levitation in the paper you linked is pretty compelling. This isn’t a complex, noisy measurement showing something that’s related to superconductivity — this is a magnet and a supposed superconductor repelling each other.

As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t notice), electrets (seems pretty unlikely here), very extreme amounts of static charge (again, seems unlikely), and actual superconductivity (would be awesome).

Random bits of cooked oxides, ceramics, and such don’t float on a magnet.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#146

Post by hatsunearu » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #35

scarmig wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the paper has experimental results and it should be easily reproducible by pretty much any lab. Do you think they should be hopping on CNN to give a public demonstration with the announcement? If a material with the properties described actually exists, this paper is exactly the kind of announcement and evidence we'd want for it.

No, I agree with you that a quiet “this is what we've found, this is what we think it means, please reproduce or tell us if you find something we've misinterpreted”, rather than a public fanfare, is how a potential scientific breakthrough should be done IMO. I think I cross-pollinated this thread with another where someone was asking “if this is true why isn't it on the front pages”. The extraordinary evidence I'd wa…

I'm sure they believe their own results, but if they made a mistake, parading on TV would be a horrible mistake and a horrible embarrassment.

Also this is a preprint so clearly it's not vetted by others yet.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#147

Post by nine_k » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

abtinf wrote: post #108

intrasight wrote: post #87

The Sagan standard is the adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (a concept abbreviated as ECREE). But one can hope such evidence is forthcoming. And if it is, then short the oil majors.

Or go long—such a breakthrough would radically increase demand for energy.

Depending on the expense of making the new material, it may become actually feasible to build solar panels across Sahara and feed both Africa and Europe with the electricity generated, because transmission will become lossless and physically compact.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#148

Post by scarmig » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

coolspot wrote: post #121

sheepscreek wrote: post #48

One of the authors in a related paper[1] is Hyun-Tak Kim. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals[2]. One even has > 1500 citations[3]. I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon. 1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O show…

> Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure Is it late April Fools joke? It can’t be true. Edit: I am not surprised it levitates. I am astonished by how much it will reshape our world if it is real room-temp and ambient-pressure superconductor. Also is easy to produce. Just too good to be true.

Levitation is to be expected for any superconductor when it's in a superconducting state; that part is banal. The big question is whether it's actually a superconductor at RTP. Their results are strong enough that it's unlikely to be a mistake, though fraud is possible too (although it is so easily uncovered given the simplicity of preparing the material and the strength of the reported effects that fraud seems almost pointless since it'll be uncovered immediately).

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#149

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

postmortembees wrote: post #124

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superconductors change every assumption about how we harness electricity and magnetism. Beyond reducing the cost of electricity transmission, they enable all sorts of fascinating applications: - They enable low cost, continuous, passively-stable magnetic levitation. Superconductors could replace ball bearings in many applications. - They enable permanent magnets that are far stronger than any we make from conventiona…

What if your PC did not need cooling, because it generated no heat? How much more potent could computers be?

Computation inherently generates heat, but if you could make chips that release negligible amounts of heat, you would unlock the third dimension which would help with reducing signal length and enable computers to be significantly faster.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#150

Post by obblekk » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals).

If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days.

If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster.

Hopefully it repros.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf page 3