The material containing lead is very unfortunate. I have no doubts that (if it indeed turns out to be a superconductor) humans will use it anyway in any context where it provides even a slight benefit (cf. just in the lead department: leaded gasoline, leaded solder, etc.).
Electronic Structure of LK-99
141–150 of 448 posts
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#142This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I’ve been about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise towards winning a world championship. Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. An…
Pons & Fleischman was exciting for about 3 days. Some folks kept looking for decades after.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol same as it ever was
not really. before, fraud claims were from the non-believers. now, the fraud claims are from the SEC and other government agencies. one can be swatted away with clever tweets, er, xes (what are tweets called now?), the other sees people going to jail.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pons & Fleischman was exciting for about 3 days. Some folks kept looking for decades after.
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Comparing the two is silly.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
So happy to hear this. I've been hoping for some sort of breakthrough ever since I first encountered footage of magnets falling through Cu tubes at an extremely leisurely pace.
If you haven't seen it, levitating frogs are also quite wonderful. https://slate.com/business/2014/05/nobel-prize-in-physics-an... An Ig Nobel AND a Nobel. That's quite the achievement.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
More people saying it sounds feasibly like it could be a superconductor is great, but agreed - https://nitter.net/MichaelSFuhrer/status/1686267690770739200 and similar threads by actual experts in the field have outlined that DFT studies ignore a lot of variables that need to line up for superconductivity, in harsh contrast to techbros on Twitter claiming they're proof of the next thousand year golden era.
Yeah the techbros have been the worst. Coffee guy went from saying the first DFT paper should deserve a Nobel to, "it's not a strong signal of anything" in 12 hours. WTF. All the actual scientists have been rock steady at, "it is probably not going to replicate," especially CMTC. Techbro speculation on physics should be considered harmful.
why?
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I've read it, the first lead to the material was 99. 2018 They got funding to research it further, 2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing first as th…
Im sure I’m not the only person thinking 24 years is way too long for such an important advancement. Huge respect for those in this field or others that don’t give up after so many years. Thank you
If it increases entropy as much as many suspect and it only took 1/3 of a couple humans' lives to open that phase space, the Universe has done what it wanted - to hasten heat-death.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#148The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.
It's so hard not to be crazy excited about the future. The past few months are proving to be an absolute breakout for the literal human race. So far we've seen: 1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain in energy 2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what could become an AGI. 3. In May we find out apparently our government…
To restate it. We were able to simulate the implosion of the secondary stage of a thermonuclear device in a lab by the means of lasers, to the point that this simulation has ~ 0.001% the efficiency of a real device.
We also probably learned a lot about the amplification of x-rays by the casing material that would have been useful during the SDI days of the early 80s.
tldr; It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab.
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kwon is humanities' hero for leaking this knowledge to the world
Ultimately I'm glad that the research has seen the light, since I'm of the personal persuasion that there is no single scrap of science that should ever be done in the dark. All research, in a perfect world, would be entirely public and freely and easily accessible. With that being said, I'm not sure if leaking a paper and selfishly putting your name on it and excluding others so that you win a Nobel Prize doesn't ex…
Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99
#150I got my PhD studying band structure of high-tc superconductors (experimentalist, ARPES). These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re: all the cuprates). (Note: I specifically worked in a lab that was measuring a lot of the d-wave character / gap-energies of various superconductors) All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real su…
Serious question- I saw the original video, where once they stopped waving the magnet around and held it near the sheet of LK-99, it looked to me like it stayed at a specific standoff distance, with no decay. Assuming no videographic trickery, what else could it be, other than the Meissner effect?
"In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom of the diamagnetic material is zero."