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

The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 906 posts

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

#341

Post by JumpCrisscross »

xxpor wrote: post #322
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…

One catch would be the use of lead would restrict the use cases fairly heavily

> the use of lead would restrict the use cases

Most people aren't licking the insides of their computer processors, fusion reactors, radio telescopes and MRIs.

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

#342

Post by phatskat »

xxpor wrote: post #322
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…

One catch would be the use of lead would restrict the use cases fairly heavily

> fairly heavily

Not being in sciences I can’t tell if this sentence is legit or you just got a good joke in there

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

#343

Post by thfuran »

benlivengood wrote: post #58
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we found the perfect material, where it was easy and cheap to create long strong wires for power transmission as well as semiconductor-scale nano wires, we'd be gaining something like (wild ass guess) 20% gain in efficiency. 20% would be nice but would it really beat the last hundred years of discoveries? I don't think so, especially with digital tech's profound world-reshaping continuing to accelerate.

Specifically you could lay undersea superconducting cables around the world and rely on a global electrical grid which allows for nearly 100% solar generation. Superconducting magnets become cheap and widely available which allows for maglev trains at massive scale. Costs for the LHC and similar experiments would drop dramatically. MRIs would only require air conditioning, if that; Modern cell phones are sufficient t…

Global electric grids aren't on a common standard. They're not all the same frequency or voltage, so you can't just wire them together. And changing over would be a mess. MRIs require very high field strength that this superconductor likely cannot sustain.

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

#344

Post by kjs3 »

distortionfield wrote: post #254
carabiner wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya no shit. Desperation makes people do dumb things.

You think this team would jeopardize their reputations by faking this data with such easily verifiable and thus refutable claims?

It's not unheard of. [1]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2

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

#345

Post by post-it »

lazide wrote: post #328
guerrilla wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it'll change society quickly True. > and permanently for the better. You can't know that.

Are you saying superconducting railguns could possibly cause problems?!?

They could only cause problems solvable by more superconducting railguns, so they're a net zero at worst.

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

#346

Post by oceanplexian »

jychang wrote: post #285
nine_k wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thin layers can be stacked. What's more interesting is flexibility. Current ceramic liquid-nitrogen-cooled superconductors are not flexible at all; they are brittle. This can be fine for a transmission line, but makes things hard for various coils.

Meh. Wake me up when Graphene is commercially sold.

Graphene is being used in high performance batteries for RC use (https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-graphene-lipo-batteries....). They can put out a good bit more current than a regular lipo, I don't know the science behind it though.

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

#347

Post by hinkley »

benlivengood wrote: post #58
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we found the perfect material, where it was easy and cheap to create long strong wires for power transmission as well as semiconductor-scale nano wires, we'd be gaining something like (wild ass guess) 20% gain in efficiency. 20% would be nice but would it really beat the last hundred years of discoveries? I don't think so, especially with digital tech's profound world-reshaping continuing to accelerate.

Specifically you could lay undersea superconducting cables around the world and rely on a global electrical grid which allows for nearly 100% solar generation. Superconducting magnets become cheap and widely available which allows for maglev trains at massive scale. Costs for the LHC and similar experiments would drop dramatically. MRIs would only require air conditioning, if that; Modern cell phones are sufficient t…

You could also build power transformers that are more efficient. Transformers can be up to 95-98% efficient when running at their ideal power levels, but those numbers fall off when they are operating outside of that range. So you're probably looking at an almost 10% reduction of power usage by electronic equipment even before you get to making superconducting integrated circuits.

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

#348

Post by floxy »

allenrb wrote: post #4

If this were true, I would’ve expected to see it on the front page of the New York Times, not hiding in a scientific journal. Color me skeptical, with a hint of optimism.

>If this were true, I would’ve expected to see it on the front page of the New York Times

Welcome to the information age my friend! Where you can know things before the gatekeepers do.

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

#349

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Maxion wrote: post #162
obblekk wrote: post #150

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 perman…

You need a furnace that can hold a vacuum, though.

> need a furnace that can hold a vacuum

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE

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

#350

Post by petsfed »

xxpor wrote: post #322
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…

One catch would be the use of lead would restrict the use cases fairly heavily

Its not a dirty secret, but just like the rules on chemicals under the organic certification, if you can show that there's no way to do what you want to do with lead-free, you can get an exemption. I suspect that "significantly lowers the cost of power generation" would outweigh "contains lead".
Post reply on HN