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A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

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Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#171

Post by badman2001 »

the dft results are definitely interesting, but i note that with the caveat that my background is in experimental condensed matter physics for materials like this and not theoretical, my understanding is that the dominant feature of the conclusions (the flat bands) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for superconductivity in the way the authors describe.

again, in experimental condensed matter physics it's acceptable to do a fine experiment and then throw in a half-baked "theoretical underpinning" to appease reviewers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the superconductivity turns out to be totally unrelated to the mechanism proposed in the paper. i would really like to see some more robust characterization work(biased because this is my background), hopefully some of the labs doing the replication studies can take a look at the juicy stuff

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#172

Post by itsarnavb »

kijin wrote: post #95
declan_roberts wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun part about this is how easy things are to grasp even though I have zero background in the science.

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.

And the techniques to produce the material are not too crazy, all within reach of sufficiently dedicated amateurs

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#173

Post by hinkley »

hilbertseries wrote: post #103
bugglebeetle wrote: post #45

With all the recent “the government has alien spacecraft news” and the bizarre circumstances of this material’s creation, the (I know to be ridiculous) conspiratorial part of my mind is going “I guess climate change is finally forcing them to take stuff out of the extraterrestrial vaults.”

So they planted this with a Korean lab a few years ago?

I mean we do have a defense pact with South Korea... There are worse places to establish parallel discovery.

Plausible enough for science fiction at least.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#174

Post by overnight5349 »

mmh0000 wrote: post #41
anyoneamous wrote: post #30

Mostly, I am just glad that all the LK-99 posts are drowning out the "AI" news for a few days.

But fear the news if it is discovered that LK-99 increases AI performance.

Reminds me of the (absolutely dreadful) series by Tobias Roote where a certain space metal gets alloyed by human blood to produce AI processors a hundred times more powerful.

Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#175

Post by throwawaymaths »

jvm___ wrote: post #102
anyoneamous wrote: post #30

Mostly, I am just glad that all the LK-99 posts are drowning out the "AI" news for a few days.

AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows. Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos. Musk buys twitter. A submarine visited the titani…

If you want a tinfoil hat, consider that the LK-99 news dropped around the time that the US military is being exposed for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#176

Post by bugglebeetle »

daveguy wrote: post #122
pjmorris wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the news that ChatGPT is attempting an LK-99 replication.

Yes. Using the well known ChatGPT manufacturing capabilities.

You mean emailing a for-profit materials science lab somewhere, like it did when it had that task rabbit solve a CAPTCHA for it?

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#177

Post by Sharlin »

dekhn wrote: post #144
largbae wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just low... _zero_. That's where things get weird.

Well, you still lose current over time... for example, we had to dump a bucket of electrons into our superconducting, supercooled magnet about every month ago to keep things swirling properly. (The EE I worked with later didn't believe me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist... and note that the loss was due to details of magnetic superconductors, not superconductors in general)

Yeah,

> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity)

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#178

Post by hinkley »

codeulike wrote: post #169
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).

But now we know its possible, maybe they can figure out the structures that make it work and develop better materials?

I'm hoping for something that isn't made entirely out of a superfund site material, personally.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#179

Post by visarga »

codeulike wrote: post #156
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…

If they could get it down to modern chip scale, does that mean you could run a processor very very fast and not generate heat? Or at least a lot less heat? So that would mean much faster clock speeds? What would be the limit on clock speed if you had a superconducting processor?

No, it only works for direct current. While superconducting processors could, in principle, operate more efficiently and perhaps at higher speeds than conventional processors, they won't be completely free of energy losses. AC can induce losses due to electromagnetic fields.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#180

Post by declan_roberts »

deeg wrote: post #165

I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.

I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.
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