A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments

by nneonneo • 3 years ago

1215 766 3 years ago

science.org

floxy3• 3 years ago

Oooh, citogenesis in action.

kstrauser• 3 years ago

That made me literally LOL. Thank you.

gwill• 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/978/

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

Forget posting with a year, or month, or day.

These stories need a time-stamp.

Who replicated or not since this morning.

cududa2• 3 years ago

The time stamps are below the post’s title

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

You know how sometimes people complain about an old story, and say put year in the title, like this.

(2014) Some Title

What is below the title is a time since posted, not the date of the article.

This was a joke. Since there are multiple submittals every hour today about this story.

So need something like

(8/1/2023 10AM) Yet Another Story, about another group, with claim about Replication of Superconductor

firatkizilboga2• 3 years ago

I want to believe

nick__m• 3 years ago

You are not alone !

sandworm101• 3 years ago

And a great many people also want you to believe. Just remember: don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified.

Night_Thastus• 3 years ago

Who could you possibly give money for this? It's not like there's a as-seen-on-TV ad for superconductors.

But I agree that it needs a healthy dose of skepticism until several reputable groups have replicated it.

firatkizilboga2• 3 years ago

Why would I pay any money when I can just cook it up at home?

wilg4• 3 years ago

don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified

Instructions unclear: can't buy lunch.

scarmig3• 3 years ago

"Guardedly optimistic"!

ck2• 3 years ago

I will never get tired of this story (and fresh Derek Lowe)

PBS had a documentary about the possibilities way back in the 1980s and I still remember it

It won't change things overnight or even this year but the benefits to humankind will be huge eventually.

(and we'll need more power transmission more cheaply for all that extra air-conditioning we'll need unfortunately)

drexlspivey2• 3 years ago

New replication video coming from China

https://twitter.com/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360

zevv• 3 years ago

https://nitter.net/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360

RandallBrown• 3 years ago

Can someone explain how this video shows superconductivity?

7moritz72• 3 years ago

It shows the magnetic effects associated with superconductors, which are omnidirectional from my understanding, in contrast to a 'regular magnet'

declan_roberts7• 3 years ago

There's all kinds of cool examples of this using liquid nitrogen to make a superconductor exhibit the Meissner effect.

The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.

https://youtu.be/HRLvVkkq5GE?t=53

mrtksn2• 3 years ago

[not an expert but...]It shows strong diamagnetism(being repelled by both of the poles of a magnet), which is a property of superconductors. Not necessarily a superconductor though, that’s still to be established but at least it shows that the inventors are up to something and it’s not complete fabrication.

7moritz72• 3 years ago

I have seen three now from China alone. Plus a calculation from some respected institute from today that confirms the theory

fallingknife3• 3 years ago

Why are they all from China? Why are they able to replicate so much faster than US labs?

elfbargpt• 3 years ago

Throughout this whole saga I've had this feeling that at the very least we can rely on China to really pursue this new development to it's logical end. It's kind of sad, but I don't think I can say the same about the US at this moment. You know for a fact China's going to JUMP on this, figure out if it works or not, and iterate.

delfinom• 3 years ago

Can't tell if it's a troll by having a video clip of a video clip

svnt• 3 years ago

You mean the fact that someone is recording their screen with the microscope video feed at the same time as the magnet in the hand they are placing underneath the scope? It looks like a pretty bog-standard lab video to me.

In addition to being the fastest way that doesn’t require any video editing, I can’t really think of a way to do it that would be more likely to be real.

nemof• 3 years ago

here's the original video, i assume the twitter user didn't know how to download or deeplink to it so they screen recorded it.

https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

Hang on, wouldn't a sliver of any magnetic material behave like this within a moving magnetic field? This replication is a fail, yes?

jeron• 3 years ago

From the paper about the replication, they cast strong doubts on the original paper and consider it a fail

drexlspivey2• 3 years ago

Both polarities repel the material, a normal magnetic material would attract the second time

marshray5• 3 years ago

Neither lead nor copper are what we would normally consider a "magnetic material" like iron.

That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.

Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.

soligern4• 3 years ago

No, it’s repelled by both poles.

nomel3• 3 years ago

A magnetic material would orient itself to the magnet, and then move towards the magnet, not get "stuck" in its fields.

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

My question was on the money after all -- this appears to have been the property being exhibited. Presumably the downvoter was a co-author.

RivieraKid• 3 years ago

China is very good at replicating.

modzu• 3 years ago

i dont suppose this is pyrolytic carbon

Palpatineli2• 3 years ago

Doesn’t have to be. One of the ingredients has diamagnetism already

cardosof• 3 years ago

this changes everything (if it's true)

scythe• 3 years ago

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who thought that the DFT computational preprints were very promising.

Unfortunately, they also indicate that the desired substitution will be very hard to achieve — crucially, the "crush and separate the composite" suggestion a few commenters have made is unlikely to work, since the heterogeneity exists within the same crystal, depending on whether Cu substitutes into Pb {1} (good) or Pb {2} (bad) crystal sites. This may be why the very oblique synthetic approach favored by the authors — reacting copper phosphide with lanarkite, giving lots of copper sulfide byproduct — was needed to give interesting properties. Now that we have an idea of what to look for, though, it may be possible to derive other synthetic approaches with a clear idea of what particular sort of copper substitution should be achieved, and a way to determine if it was achieved.

Of course, there remains a possibility that all of this is a big mistake, but now it would have to be several correlated mistakes. It may be a long time until the necessary selective substitution is achieved in a high-quality bulk sample, so, going on this hypothesis, I do not expect a sudden rush of new technologies in the near-term.

gaze• 3 years ago

Kinda? You'd expect flat bands from putting a copper atom into a big insulating supercell. The population of the d band is interesting, though. I don't find it super super compelling, but it's certainly not nothing.

radioactivist• 3 years ago

Yes, given the Cu atoms seem to be ~8 Angstrom apart the flat bands are to be expected. So its not clear what "special" about these, given if you just had dilute Cu impurities in some otherwise insulating I'd imagine you'd have something similar for the Cu d-bands.

calf• 3 years ago

Could there be limitations to making a large piece of this crystal, so in practice it is never useful?

ironborn1232• 3 years ago

A question that arises, how good is chemical vapor deposition (albeit a very expensive way and hence for labwork only) in creating a pure sample with proper Cu substitutions?

carabiner3• 3 years ago

The widespread consensus among experts who have done DFT is that the preprint doesn't add anything to how they feel about LK-99. https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1686392015217741825 sums it up: Griffin's paper is neither proof of superconductivity nor even a very strong signal of it. Flat bands can mean many things; in fact, the crystal structure Griffin assumes may have been selected due to their likelihood.

CMTC says the Griffin paper doesn't really shift anything and they still believe replication is unlikely: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1686373904044949504...

weard_beard3• 3 years ago

Maybe you can help here, I was completely lost in terms of the Iris (Russian Cat Girl) mention of, "engineering conductivity pili of bacteria into the superconductors" is this a reference to nano scale bio engineering or a means of reliable replication of the superconducting structure itself?

Or is this just nonsense? https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685322871306928128

feoren2• 3 years ago

Sounds like nonsense. You can't do atomic-level engineering with bacteria, they are 9 orders of magnitude too big. We're talking about being able to place copper atoms at specific points on a crystal structure, while avoiding placing them at points they'd rather be at. Bacteria? Give me a break.

Ajay-p2• 3 years ago

I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?

TheJoeMan• 3 years ago

Ever seen one of these high school science demos?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM

Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.

declan_roberts7• 3 years ago

The Meissner effect has a lot of potential even outside of the energy efficiency changes (which is by far the most important).

It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.

roywiggins2• 3 years ago

A huge renaissance in desk toys, at the very least!

digdugdirk• 3 years ago

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 want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.

N1H1L• 3 years ago

They are also very good energy storage media. Combine that with zero transmission losses - you can now highly efficient EV powertrains that are significantly more compact. 1000 mile EVs become actually viable.

Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.

martinald• 3 years ago

Hmm. Losses from HVDC transmission are on the order of 3% per 1000km, so I'm not sure how much of a big deal it'd be for that kind of use case. Your example would only save ~6% transmission losses. An improvement yes but not really a big deal, unless the cables were far cheaper to make than current HVDC cables (which I'm doubtful about).

I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.

animatedb• 3 years ago

Superconductor means low resistance. Low resistance means less loss due to heat on a wire. Room temperature superconductor also means more efficient magnets for motors, coils, ending up in cars, MRI machines, etc.

hanniabu• 3 years ago

Would a room-temp superconductor make it feasible to cover desert regions with solar panels and transport the electricity long distances?

gradascent• 3 years ago

I imagine that carbon footprint could be reduced substantially by this too, at least on a per-watt of utilized energy basis. Imagine if all computer chips used semiconductor materials - then more of the input electricity is actually put towards computing, and cooling fans are a thing of the past!

codeulike3• 3 years ago

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?

codeulike3• 3 years ago

Would help with fusion, right?

thsksbd• 3 years ago

It probably has no applications in transmission. Trans losses arent that high; not enough to justify refurbishing the grid.

The electrical resistance per se is actually not that interesting. Certainly not for energy loss. Electronics would benefit, especially CPUs if transistor switching doesn't heat the interconnects above the transition T (the actual cpu is much hotter than the package where the thermocouple is).

High quality (as in high Q) passives would be cool. Think very good capacitors and inductors for filtering. Super cond. caps wouldn't be great for energy dumping since high B fields kill the superconducting effect.

The magnetic properties are more interesting. MRIs w/out crygenic cooling, mag levitation without stabilization.

Apparently there are quantum applications too, but Im not too sure about those but my physicist friend is super excited (in a bad way) for quantum computers now.

If this pans out we're looking at an unexpected revolution.

alkibiades• 3 years ago

is this material cheap enough to make such a power line economically feasible

michaelmarion• 3 years ago

IANAP, but a layman's understanding: the materials that we have available today to conduct electricity at or around room temperatures largely do so in an inefficient manner. As electricity moves through the material, some energy is wasted in the form of ejected heat.

To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.

A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines.

Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...

Salgat3• 3 years ago

"Inefficient" is a rather relative term here, since batteries, motors, and transmission wires are >=95% efficient already.

mecsred• 3 years ago

Conductors carry electrical current but have resistance, so you lose power to heat. Superconductors have effectively zero resistance so you don't lose power as they conduct.

We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.

aeternum• 3 years ago

Zero resistance and therefore zero electrical transmission losses would be one of the most significant real-world benefits.

There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis

As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.

KSS42• 3 years ago

See:

Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder

Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring.

https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8

delusional2• 3 years ago

I'm not expert, but I think about it like this: Resistance is the tendency of a material to convert electrical energy into heat. Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". A superconductor then has the cool property of being able to carry electrical energy without converting any of it into heat. That's obviously cool for energy transmission, but it also enabled some other counterintuitive effects.

Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field.

We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.

Workaccount25• 3 years ago

Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time".

This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.

W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R

So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.

Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.

esalman• 3 years ago

Think your EV is so efficient that you only need to charge it once every 5000 miles.

Salgat3• 3 years ago

How does a superconductor help with that? Lithium ion is already 95-99% efficient, same with motors. It would help with the charging cable, but that's not increasing the battery capacity. Off the top of my head the main advantage here seems to be MRIs, maybe also maglev trains, maybe generators? It really depends on the form factor of this superconductor compared to copper wire.

tomelders• 3 years ago

Hoverboards.

mewse-hn• 3 years ago

For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.

Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed.

We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.

Axsuul• 3 years ago

For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.

Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?

failuser4• 3 years ago

Avatar 3 will have practical unobtanium.

shin_lao• 3 years ago

Superconductor are more efficient at transmitting energy, here are some consequences:

- Cheaper electricity transportation

- New kind of batteries

- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them

- Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper

- Probably lots of things we can't even think of

If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.

allenrb2• 3 years ago

- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them

And now I’m imagining a superconducting toaster. Such frustration!

frays• 3 years ago

Thank you for listing the consequences of LK99 / having superconductors available at room temperature.

SanderNL• 3 years ago

This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure. Good luck to all involved.

I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.

declan_roberts7• 3 years ago

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

kijin2• 3 years ago

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.

kijin2• 3 years ago

It almost feels like we're back in the days of Lavoisier. Scientists staging elaborate public experiments, blowing things up to support or debunk a popular theory. Deadly rivalries, publicity stunts, each new development a matter of personal, institutional, and national hubris.

lordnacho• 3 years ago

Personally I can't wait to be able to go to the Royal Institution in London to see someone demonstrate this thing.

Just like they demonstrated all the stuff you know from school over a hundred years ago, before you needed fancy equipment to do anything.

eesmith• 3 years ago

It reminds me of the days of cold fusion. Or the days of buckminsterfullerene.

Basically, something which is very unexpected, with potentially large consequences, and which can be done in many labs using discretionary funding.

Agingcoder• 3 years ago

Yes, this is absolutely thrilling. I can’t help looking for the latest development everyday.

baq5• 3 years ago

Every day? I’m checking like every half hour

hinkley6• 3 years ago

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).

codeulike3• 3 years ago

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

elteto• 3 years ago

It took 80 years to go from a crude prototype at Bell Labs to Apple announcing the M1. We just need to know it’s possible. The rest will follow.

amluto• 3 years ago

The effective cross-sectional area of the original sample could well be minuscule. (I assume that, if a room temperature superconductor has been found, it constitutes a tiny fraction of the sample.)

titzer• 3 years ago

The current is related to the cross-sectional area of the (super)conductor. Not sure how big their sample was, but the solution is thicker and more cables.

jagrsw• 3 years ago

I don't know much about superconductivity, but if 0.25A is the limit no matter the cross-section of conductor, you can multiply/parallelize the conductors - i.e. series of "microconductors", each carrying 0.25A, which would add up to whatever you want?

baq5• 3 years ago

I assure you if 260mA room temperature and pressure superconducting wire can be consistently produced we’ll be living in the future.

rodgerd• 3 years ago

This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure.

One wit on a different social media site opined that "all technological advances such as plumbing and petrol result in lead poisoning, so perhaps this is real".

vinnyvichy• 3 years ago

He forgot about the 3rd P, perovskites (cheaper & more efficient solar cells)

anyoneamous3• 3 years ago

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

mmh0000• 3 years ago

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

ssijak2• 3 years ago

Imagine NVIDIA superconducting chips made for AI

pjmorris• 3 years ago

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

bhouston2• 3 years ago

I'm sure Elon also has SpaceX or something trying to replicate it as well. He sort of has to jump on each new trend anyhow.

In a serious note, superconductors are likely useful in electric magnetic motors and probably in high power electronics and batteries in general, no?

overnight5349• 3 years ago

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.

jvm___4• 3 years ago

A planet completely populated by electronic beings.

Single-celled life, multi-cellular, mushrooms, trees, whatever ate lignin, dinosaurs, rodents, humans, Electric beings? I mean, there's nothing 'unnatural' about a world populated by robots, we just assume that 'alive' means 'made of meat', but the raw materials in a robot and a human are all Earth based.

Vox_Leone• 3 years ago

Seriously speaking, it can in fact increase AI performance, since it will optimize all things electromagnetic. It takes humankind closer to the so called 'singularity'.

davidgerard• 3 years ago

there's already superconductor twitter guys who were AI guys last week

highwaylights4• 3 years ago

Don’t be. Twitter/X/whatever they’re calling it this week is crawling with Pepe investment bros talking about bullish sentiment because superconductors equals singularity musk crypto AI blah blah blah.

It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

CoolGuySteve• 3 years ago

Yeah, hnews is the place to be, nobody here is ever excited about anything new.

smolder• 3 years ago

That sounds like a good reason not to visit Twitter/X/whatever.

jvm___4• 3 years ago

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 titanic and imploded.

</tinfoil hat>

TomK32• 3 years ago

ChatGPT please rewrite this in a language of the King James bible.

throwawaymaths• 3 years ago

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

anyoneamous3• 3 years ago

Superconducting material discovered right around the time conversations about UFOs are kicking off again - coincidence?

jacobwilliamroy• 3 years ago

The only thing I care about is voyager 2 and I'm not going to hear how that thing is doing until October 15.

ragnot• 3 years ago

Someone call Tom Cruise, the entity is real!

joefigura3• 3 years ago

Dude sometimes scientific progress really does happen, and it's messy when it's happening live, and people get excited about it because they really do find science inherently exciting.

I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.

guestbest• 3 years ago

Anything is better than crypto.

ChuckMcM2• 3 years ago

How about LK-99 coins!?!? Right? Maybe we use diffusion to design them so they are "super-conducting crypto AI coins" get yours now for only $199 at the Philadelphia Mint. Act now, supplies are limited!

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

Crypto is utterly useless, a walled off sector of cons.

AI is useful enough to be dangerous in the hands of bad actors, where the marks are not just the suckers but the people who want to have nothing to do with it.

scarmig3• 3 years ago

My new start-up, Super Conducting Artifical Minds, is releasing a new coin that allows zero resistance neural network computation on the block chain. Get in on it now and you can make millions in passive income!

AlanSE3• 3 years ago

No no no, this eliminates the need for cryo, not crypto.

hinkley6• 3 years ago

This is going to turn into the Iran Contra affair all over again.

Get tired of one set of assholes? Funnel resources to another set of assholes (who also wish you harm).

If this turns out to be actually true then everyone will want to talk about fusion again. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. But as you say, at least it's not AI.

AlanSE3• 3 years ago

Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.

If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.

playa1• 3 years ago

What has happened to HN the past few months? So much AI, Superconductors and open source air quality monitoring.

1attice3• 3 years ago

You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error.

It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.

1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)

2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)

3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.

You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.

twoquestions• 3 years ago

Even if this doesn't pan out, I'll dare to hope we get useful stuff out of this, like how we got Duct (duck?) tape and silly putty.

If it does, hoo boy!

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

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.”

hilbertseries• 3 years ago

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

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

Please see “I know to be ridiculous” in my comment. This was intended as a joke.

hinkley6• 3 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.

BirAdam• 3 years ago

Having known many conspiracy theorists... yeah. Given the US troop presence in Korea, they would say "absolutely," and they'd then adjust their tinfoil hats.

Workaccount25• 3 years ago

The namesake of LK-99 is the year it was first synthesized - 1999.

weard_beard3• 3 years ago

... or Gödel was right and the universe spins and backward time travel is possible and they got permission to pull some future inventions out of the vault retrieved from future us ... in order to make sure we actually make it to future us ... which we should ... because the inventions are real ...

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

This one is fun too.

baja_blast• 3 years ago

I don't know, the material is a ceramic made of a powdered lead, copper, sulphur, phosphorus and oxygen heated up together. It's not some advanced meta material which if true it's amazing this was not discovered earlier but let's just hope it is.

bugglebeetle6• 3 years ago

This was intended as a joke, but since most raw materials in the universe are the same, extraterrestrials deriving novel combinations is just as, if not more likely, than meta materials etc.

micromacrofoot2• 3 years ago

the government didn't have news, someone that worked for it said they heard someone else say something

Zigurd• 3 years ago

One interesting aspect here is that the materials processing is comparatively simple. A real industrial process might require much higher precision. But none of this needs aliens. Based on descriptions of the process, it looks like anyone could try to replicate.

TX81Z• 3 years ago

I want to believe.

mk_stjames• 3 years ago

I would be interested to see the daily order numbers on Sigma Aldrich's supplychain website for Lead II Oxide and Copper Phosphide powder in the last week....

russellbeattie• 3 years ago

I wonder if this is just summertime boredom combined with social media blowing an interesting development out of proportion, or if we're actually witnessing history in real time?

Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?

Exuma2• 3 years ago

I’m also wondering this. People keep saying this is as big as transistors and the Iron Age and so far the only examples I see are slightly more efficient power. The quantum computing one seemed like the only potentially huge benefit. But what do I know

vasco• 3 years ago

How likely is this to lead to breaking all encryption by enabling way bigger superconducting quantum computers with way more qubits than are reasonable nowadays? Is this just going to turn into cyberwar on steroids?

scythmic_waves• 3 years ago

There are post-quantum-computing encryption schemes [1], thankfully.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

LordDragonfang• 3 years ago

That still leaves all encrypted traffic on the current internet vulnerable to a store-and-decrypt-later attack, which is more concerning the nearer that "later" is.

Strilanc• 3 years ago

Just because you could operate superconducting qubits at high temperature doesn't mean you would. By far the biggest problem for qubits is noise, and raising the temperature would increase noise. I won't claim a high Tc superconductor can't help... but my gut reaction is that it's irrelevant to the actual engineering issues as they currently stand.

ssijak2• 3 years ago

Third replication on some Chinese website https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720

orangepurple2• 3 years ago

Description by the author, translated by Google Translate:

I need to clarify and explain: the sample is standing above the magnet, and it will immediately return to standing when pressed with tweezers in front of the video, similar to the anti-magnetism of Koreans. In the back of the video, because the sample is too small, I dare not push it with tweezers, and it is easy to break the sample, so I moved the paper a little sideways, and it can be seen that the sample is still diamagnetic, and it is not that the moving magnet is moving with the magnet. Whether it is related to flux pinning or superconductivity remains to be further verified. Please treat it rationally!

Original: 我需要澄清和解释一下：样品在磁铁上方是站立着，视频前面用镊子去压它马上又恢复站立状态，类似韩国人的抗磁性。视频后面因为样品太小，没敢用镊子去推，容易把样品搞碎，所以稍微横移了一下纸张，可以看到样品还是呈抗磁性，并不是移动磁铁跟着磁铁在移动。是否属于磁通钉扎或者超导相关还有待进一步的验证。请理性看待！

fHr• 3 years ago

ok this is very exciting to hear

MillionOClock• 3 years ago

If it's real, how fast could we see concrete applications using this material? 5-year time frame? 10-year time frame? More?

radicaldreamer• 3 years ago

Nobody knows, it depends on a multitude of factors, but most likely this won't be the exact material which will have applications, I'm sure there is a much easier to fabricate related material which will be the first of a whole set of materials which act as superconductors at room temperatures.

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

Why be so sure about that? I really hope it doesn't turn out to be graphene 2.0, a material that can revolutionize everything but can't be produced consistently and in usable quantities by any means at all.

distortionfield3• 3 years ago

Yeah, this feels like the really early results of a material that they eventually refine into a process, hence their patents. There are reports they were worried about being beaten to the punch, im curious if that’s true and if so, who the word on the street said was close.

brucethemoose24• 3 years ago

if you could grow a good single crystal of LK-99, it seems as if the superconductivity might only occur along one crystal axis: put crudely, you'd see superconductivity if you hooked your wires to two particular opposite faces of said crystal, but not to the others! Crystalline grain boundaries are already known to be a big deal in the efficiency of existing superconducting materials, and this would mean that polycrystalline samples of LK-99 would be pretty unfavorable to demonstrating robust effects.

I think this means production of usable superconducting masses will be tricky, if its even possible.

So... Probably on the longer side? Time will be needed to figure out how to make it macroscopically, or discover a similar compound thats easier to produce in bulk.

But once wire, coils, high purity samples and such start getting sold, I think the adoption would be very quick.

distortionfield3• 3 years ago

But what you just described would still be insanely valuable. Just in the field of semiconductors and chip fab, it would probably unlock insane gains.

themagician5• 3 years ago

If real it will be weaponized in 90-days.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

You'd need breakthroughs in the manufacturing of it (yield, process, scale, etc) and then building the infrastructure and supply chain to support it. Depending on its availability you could see governments hoard the material for "security" and "public interest" use cases, etc. Military first as usual.

If this turns out to be a super conducting material you can be assured that overnight there will be many thousands of people all around the world, from academic, corporate, government, and private labs working with the new theory and materials and discoveries will occur as our understanding of the phenomenon get deeper and wider. There will be so much incentive to find new methods and materials that have the properties of this material.

DesiLurker• 3 years ago

if its real (or real even in principle as in hard to repro say 1 in 20 times) even than the immediate consequence would be a lot of investment directly flowing into the research. combining that with some AI based techniques I'd say (if the idealized material bears out predictions at room temp) within half a decade we will see good manufacturing techniques. after that its all application specific.

zootreeves• 3 years ago

I haven’t been this excited since the EmDrive

MPSimmons• 3 years ago

Which should honestly be a warning sign.

marcusverus• 3 years ago

Why is that?

declan_roberts7• 3 years ago

Does LK-99 defy the laws of physics like the EmDrive did?

zamadatix2• 3 years ago

A room temperature and pressure semiconductor is more an astoundingly large jump forward in the space than something that defies known physics.

mrandish5• 3 years ago

They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test.

Since the base material is lead apatite, I had a random thought that maybe medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold just had it backward, as doping gold into lead might be a breakthrough. :-)

itsarnavb2• 3 years ago

Now I'm imagining what history would have looked like if the alchemists had indeed stumbled upon a floating lead apatite sample a few centuries ago...

javajosh• 3 years ago

Good idea! They wouldn't have been able to do any applications without a voltaic cell, and it would have been a novelty. Like gunpowder in ancient China.

akomtu• 3 years ago

The ring of solomon was a curious mix of metals with a magnet in it. Its inventors were definitely up to something.

themagician5• 3 years ago

I want to believe.

After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other.

♫ It's the circle of life ♫

bufferoverflow• 3 years ago

People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.

mrandish5• 3 years ago

I want to believe.

Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.

samstave2• 3 years ago

YOU IDIOT! W need the gold to turn the slaves back into carbon,m so we can make more slaves to harvest the gold!!* - https://youtu.be/rMz7JBRbmNo

I know we hate jokes - but apropos

coldtea2• 3 years ago

After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use

Wouldn't that just make gold even more valuable (and thus more killing will ensue, even ignoring the high energy weapons).

Workaccount25• 3 years ago

Watch gold be the only practically viable solution, making this new material wonderful but also incredibly expensive.

worldsayshi• 3 years ago

Time to start mining asteroids.

samstave2• 3 years ago

Postulation :

Can someone please take layers of graphene and pure gold leaf and tell me what that may result in, aside from beautiful "damascus"?

bhewes• 3 years ago

This would be huge for increasing energy density in Manhattan. Holbrook Superconductor Project uses liquid nitrogen to cool.

deeg• 3 years ago

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.

declan_roberts7• 3 years ago

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.

tills132• 3 years ago

That hasn't stopped them in the past...

ygjb• 3 years ago

I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.

byw• 3 years ago

Though that's like the opposite of how most media operate.

algoatecorn• 3 years ago

True, but that hasn't stopped MSM in the past

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

Because the media is of course known for studying topics in high detail to make sure they don't report the wrong thing and not for rushing half written hearsay out the door before the competitors do.

wilg4• 3 years ago

Genuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.

adamsb6• 3 years ago

Wait wait wait... Are eggs healthy again?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

There isn’t much to report.

t3rabytes• 3 years ago

I haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.

arcticfox5• 3 years ago

There are a ton of them on Twitter.

AlanSE3• 3 years ago

It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.

I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.

throwaway23354• 3 years ago

While you're correct about the scarce and sketchy evidence currently it is in the process of narrowing down. Or to put it better the evidence is mounting that it might be a breakthrough. It likely hard to manufacture correctly, but simulations done at Berkeley Labs seem to support the claims of the original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 And aside from that to be honest I hope that we have time to prove or disprove those claims, before any major news outlet jumps onto the hype train and ruins it.

arcticfox5• 3 years ago

I am also completely baffled by this! So many stupid mouse-model medical discovery stories over the years and actually zero LK-99 coverage.

It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published.

The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't.

What are they doing?!

nomel3• 3 years ago

What are they doing?!

Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive.

Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc.

The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.

phoenixstrike• 3 years ago

Almost all of the stories in major newspapers are commissioned ("pitched") by interest groups that want to see that article published. It's why a lot of articles contain quotes from weirdly specific people with middle-office titles in specific organizations. Journalists aren't cold calling random office workers to get these quotes. An outline of an article is provided, journalists do some minimal fact-checking and write it out into a proper article. Beat writers that cover a specific topic regularly and have made their own contacts in that field are an exception.

epistasis2• 3 years ago

99% of science journalism is repeating a press release that came out of a university's press office.

It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.

I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.

mike006322• 3 years ago

What should the headline be? "South Korean scientists claim room temperature superconductivity again! Are they lying like their last paper? Let's celebrate!"

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

Danish and German media has covered it by interviewing local scientists who are all calling it bullshit.

moooo99• 3 years ago

that does indeed sound like a very German reaction

Bjorkbat2• 3 years ago

Because until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.

stusmall2• 3 years ago

I actually appreciate that caution. Things have been extremely up in the air and it would be very hard to properly explain what is happening, how it matters and if it matters. The last part I think is why it's a good thing that they held back. There was enough unknown that it wasn't clear if this would ever amount to anymore than "some scientists may or may not have made a big mistake." I think we are hitting the point, with multiple teams saying this is either possible or has happened, that we will start seeing MSM stories. They aren't ignoring it, they are being cautious. I promise you their science beat reporters are watching this like a hawk.

I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.

wallaBBB• 3 years ago

After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about?

Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.

joefigura3• 3 years ago

Well, half the comments are making fun of the spotty quality of the evidence and it's been barely a week since the paper was published. I think it's reasonable to wait for at least a pre-print of a successful replication. I don't think it's fair to say the MSM is ignoring it, the possible discovery literally just happened and some combination of low awareness and caution with the evidence means they haven't covered it yet.

brucethemoose24• 3 years ago

Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.

A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.

The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

Even if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.

boppo12• 3 years ago

Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.

I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?

jcranmer• 3 years ago

To be frank, the available evidence at the moment is pretty shaky. Derek Lowe here is pretty optimistic, but most of the comments I've seen from the superconductor folks are pretty pessimistic [1]--and given that Derek Lowe isn't in the field, I'm inclined to favor their views over his at this point.

The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline).

[1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.

lolinder5• 3 years ago

Thanks for that link!

My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.

failuser4• 3 years ago

There have been several false reports of high-temperature superconductors during previous months. There seems to be backlash to the high-temperature superconductors claims now.

mrWiz• 3 years ago

NYT did mention it the other day, as a side note to this story about allegations of misconduct by a physicist who has studied superconductors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...

raziel2701• 3 years ago

It's because it's a piece of news that doesn't cause outrage and polarization so they don't know how to profit off it.

exoque• 3 years ago

Really? Here’s an article from one of switzerland’s biggest newspapers: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ein-supraleiter-fuer-den-alltag...

fouc3• 3 years ago

it's showing up on science news sites though, even major ones.

anshumankmr4• 3 years ago

I think if it got true mainstream acceptance, it might. Or if it is some spectacular bust (praying this is not the case), they may cover it.

badman2001• 3 years ago

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

adw3• 3 years ago

I know some DFT (*), but very little superconductivity, but I read through Sinéad Griffin's preprint and there was nothing in there which looked weird from a methodological perspective – and the methods (and software) she is using are extremely well-established and well-categorized.

(*) it was, like, two decades ago, but I've got a first-author PRB paper so I wouldn't trust me compared to an active researcher but I'm not _entirely_ clueless

foven• 3 years ago

Something that I find hard to understand is why there is superconductivity without cooper pairs; granted my understanding is related to more traditional superconductors and I'm not really very knowledgeable about the cutting edge high-Tc stuff.

montecarl2• 3 years ago

The thing that stands out to me is that the DFT simulations show that the flat bands only occur in a particular crystal structure of the material and it is not the most stable state (at least according to the simulation). This would explain the synthetic challenges involved. These simulations are not perfect, but they can be VERY useful when guided by experiment and when they correlate strongly it is a good sign that you have a mechanistic explanation of the phenomenon.

adw3• 3 years ago

The way I'd characterize it is that they're usually _directionally_ (and mechanistically) correct. On something as sensitive as a band gap the error bars are larger; if the DFT simulations said "yeah, no way this has band density at the Fermi level" I'd regard it as strong evidence against the LK-99 claims, but the fact this is in the ballpark is – to be clear, pretty weak – evidence in favor.

yreg• 3 years ago

naive question: if we can simulate this, can't we brute force other superconductors?

pvsukale3• 3 years ago

I am glad this is getting more attention. Maybe it will replicate, maybe it will not, or maybe we will find something new. But happy that this is in the news cycle.

dang2• 3 years ago

The major threads so far, in reverse order—have I missed any?

Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953819 - Aug 1, 2023 (265 comments)

LK-99 crystal verified to be magnetically levitated (with video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 - Aug 1, 2023 (10 comments)

Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952894 - Aug 1, 2023 (272 comments)

Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951815 - Aug 1, 2023 (196 comments)

Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951140 - Aug 1, 2023 (245 comments)

LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940323 - July 31, 2023 (619 comments)

Ask HN: Room temperature superconductor: what to expect? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930707 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)

“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36929386 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)

Korea Superconductor Papers Published ‘Without Consent’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927216 - July 30, 2023 (47 comments)

Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916254 - July 29, 2023 (201 comments)

LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897300 - July 27, 2023 (58 comments)

Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881808 - July 26, 2023 (471 comments)

The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624 - July 25, 2023 (875 comments)

Edit: thanks to mystery user for emailing hn@ycombinator.com to suggest we include the days, not just month/year, for fast-moving stories like this.

irthomasthomas• 3 years ago

Any idea why the Science article links to a HN post as the source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 (10 comments)

dang2• 3 years ago

Ok, I've added 36953396 to the above list - thanks!

Why did Derek Lowe link to HN? Who knows - maybe he noticed all the traffic this place has sent him, or how loved his articles are here!

sampo• 3 years ago

the Science article

It's a blog post. Not a Science article.

fragmede6• 3 years ago

Why not put them into a single megathread with the links linked in text? Each new post still has repetitive comments ("What if it's a hoax?" "What does this enable" "Reminds me of the EmDrive"...)

xutopia• 3 years ago

I'm not a scientist but how does this demonstrate anything? It just looks like a magnet is moving some metallic object. Can someone explain like I'm a five year old?

DistractionRect2• 3 years ago

So what's happening is they are demonstrating diamagnetism. Basically when exposed to an external magnetic field, that field induces a response in the material that repels it.

When people think of magnetism, they think of polar charges that either attract or repel other polar charges. Diamagnetism is neat in that regardless of the orientation and polarity of the external field, a diamagnetic material is always repelled.

Now why this matters. All superconductors exhibit diamagnetism, but not all diamagnetic materials are superconductors. So this lends credibility to lk-99 being a potential super conductor because they have been able to show it has one of properties of a superconductor.

But we're still far off from showing it is a superconductor. That will be harder because impurities and other factors can confound the results, so right now the focus is on synthesis and confirming some of the easier properties we expect to see

lolinder5• 3 years ago

So why is everyone getting so excited about superconductors when all we actually know is this (probably) exhibits diamagnetism? Is diamagnetism super rare outside of superconductors?

gtsnexp• 3 years ago

Failed attempt to replicate: Semiconducting transport in Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O sintered from Pb2SO5 and Cu3P https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2307/2307.16802.pdf

epistasis2• 3 years ago

I would expect to see such failed replications even if LK99 is the real deal. Getting the exact conditions correct for any sort of novel lab science is non-trivial, and often times the crucial variables might not even be measured in initial publications.

People use this fact to try to bash things like cancer research, but it is unfortunately just a fundamental problem of science. Scientific publications are not kernels of distilled truth, they are work-in-progress commits. If we waited to publish until every last detail is known, science discovery would slow to a snails pace and we would miss a ton of discoveries.

greggsy3• 3 years ago

These are just as important as successes, as they build knowledge about what is not possible.

carabiner3• 3 years ago

Good reason to believe what the Chinese synthesized is far way from what the Koreans characterize as LK-99: https://twitter.com/robert_palgrave/status/16863940964101488...

They tested a different substance.

gandik• 3 years ago

I followed your link, but there is nothing there. Perhaps this is why no sane person should be using X for scientific communication at this point.

carabiner3• 3 years ago

Best way I've heard the DFT preprint described: "You know those spam pop sci websites where they find a study in which a specific cancer cell is killed by a certain drug and then go to print an article titled ‘SCIENTISTS CURE CANCER’. This is a similar situation." by https://www.reddit.com/user/giantraspberry. The preprint doesn't mean much.

wut-wut• 3 years ago

Ha! "Headless Poultry Mode myself".

jtchang• 3 years ago

The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today.

- Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.

Can I have my flying car now?

klysm2• 3 years ago

Batteries that don't take any time to recharge

Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how

derefr3• 3 years ago

Resistance is what makes things hot, and heat is what makes dumping huge amounts of charge current into batteries a bad idea. No resistance → no heat → no need to charge with low current†.

Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car.

† (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)

baq5• 3 years ago

It’s a zero resistance wire. Build a loop and pump electrons in. Need them back? Connect an off-ramp.

There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality.

We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient.

Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage.

This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.

I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.

empath-nirvana• 3 years ago

Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.

Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.

jacquesm11• 3 years ago

This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch.

So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.

westurner• 3 years ago

Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground)

Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat.

From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 :

"Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)

mikro• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.

richyliu• 3 years ago

Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...

taberiand• 3 years ago

It might even all come fast enough to save us from climate change

(But I'm not getting my hopes up)

bananapub2• 3 years ago

we already know how to stop climate change: actually stop burning shit and deploy existing technologies quickly. the problem is lack of will, not lack of technology.

corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.

kleer0012• 3 years ago

Can I have my flying car now?

I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.

mettamage• 3 years ago

I wonder if self flying cars are easier to make since every object in the air is an obstacle. This is less the true for ground transport since sometimes it may seem like an obstacle but it isn't (e.g. just a marking on the road).

douglaswlance• 3 years ago

There are far fewer things to run into in the sky.

zepearl2• 3 years ago

Can I have my flying car now?

Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)

jerf2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, while you can indeed build hoverboards with superconductors and they do work, you still need a magnetic surface for it to ride over. I don't believe generalized hoverboards that will work on all surfaces like BttF are possible.

hexomancer• 3 years ago

Where is my hoverboard?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOH15_pqWZ4&ab_channel=SETHS...

danudey2• 3 years ago

There's no need to wait for flying skateboards, you can buy a regular skateboard at any shop around town and crash and get killed by using it.

(Said in jest by someone who recently turned 41 and hurt his back playing video games last year)

patall• 3 years ago

You are obviously joking but still, give foiling (as in pump foiling, wing foiling or eFoil) a try. It's not the same but the closest you can get, at least within 3 feet over a water surface (which makes crashing a lot more benign)

fragmede6• 3 years ago

I mean, yeah, you'd need a very generous marketing budget to make a skatepark full of magnets so we can have hoverboards. Like the one Lexus already built: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/6/25/8846785/lexus-hoverb...

fsh2• 3 years ago

None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.

Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.

vagab0nd2• 3 years ago

Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry.

Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.

nextaccountic• 3 years ago

CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.

Can't superconductor help here?

mNovak• 3 years ago

In the RF world (particularly at mm-wave frequencies), even copper has very non-negligible losses. In most passive circuits conductor loss is the limiting factor of performance. No idea if this material retains the same properties at such frequencies, and is compatible with typical lithography or other fabrication techniques, but it'd be amazing if so.

XorNot4• 3 years ago

Superconducting powerlines would be able to transport DC electricity with 0% losses. To put this in context: you could put solar panels in California, and send every watt of power to Alaska or New York, while losing nothing in the transport.

nwiswell4• 3 years ago

CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.

This is not true anymore. At leading edge process nodes (i.e., smaller conductor pitch), the bulk resistivity of copper changes dramatically because it is increasingly dominated by ballistic electron scattering on the interfaces and grain boundaries: surface area has decreased as a fraction of volume and the average grain size has shrunk to fit inside the interconnect lines.

Alternative metals like Cobalt and Ruthenium have been proposed and to some extent used in production as an alternative to Cu for the low interconnect layers, but they just arrest the trend -- the fact is that the interconnect resistance is much higher than it used to be.

It's also why a lot of the big players like TSMC and Intel are investing heavily in backside power delivery.

Here is an accessible article on the topic:

https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/backside-power-deliver...

(Also: high-voltage DC power is commonly used for long-range transmission and does not have coupling issues)

tomxor3• 3 years ago

CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.

Technically true but not applicable... Super conducting CPUs already exist (at below room temp), and they don't use semiconductors. They don't have an exact transistor equivalent but use digital logic circuits such as Quantum Flux Parametron (QFP) and rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ), which are comprised of Josephson Junctions [0] which are made from the same super conducting material. Relying on quantum effects of a gap between two conductors rather than specific material properties.

So while it is true that CMOS are limited by the resistance of both the conductor interconnects AND the semiconductors. Super conducting circuits only appear to need a conductor... There are other drawbacks, such as larger feature sizes due to the nature of super conducting materials, and QFP and RSFQ might be more complex? but this is potentially offset by huge advantages: zero resistance buys not only power efficiency and minimum heat generation (as required by landauer limit), but also allows circuits to be driven at a higher clock, so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower

cogman103• 3 years ago

The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground.

And to this point, HVDC has been slowly rising as a viable alternative beyond just undersea transmission.

A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for residential applications.

The cost is as AC voltage goes up, capacitive resistance increases. This is part of the reason why high voltage lines have such huge towers with the lines far apart.

An HVDC line, however, can be put underground (or water) without suffering power losses. It's voltage can go well above that of AC voltages with the only limit being how much insulation we need for the line.

Super conductors are nice, but only in the "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" sense to avoid the capactive resistance. Without any sort of special materials you get most of the benefits of super conductors by using HVDC. The only real downside is high voltage DC is still super dangerous. Cut the insulation and you've got something that can arc meters whereas a superconductor at lower voltages would be about the same danger as any other conductor at lower voltages.

jojobas• 3 years ago

The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground.

As often in engineering, the sweet spot is where multiple factors have ~equal contributions, so even a 50% win in one of the factors can't give you that much benefit.

For high voltage AC power lines it's Ohmic losses, corona discharge losses, and inductive losses.

sheepscreek2• 3 years ago

But it is. A significant part of electronics engineering is dedicated to heat dissipation.

So what do we stand to gain?

At least a slight improvement in efficiency of transmission. And a huge improvement due to simpler heat dissipation needs.

So this might mean way faster battery charging - like 500 miles worth of charge in 5 mins. We’re mainly limited by how hot the batteries get during charging.

soligern4• 3 years ago

We’re not talking about charging existing batteries but superconductors where you just “trap” large amounts of electricity in the superconductor for future use.

jader201• 3 years ago

- Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.

Finally someone is speaking English in these room-temperature superconductor threads that I can actually understand and get excited about!

None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them.

Never mind. :(

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

Did we read the same paper? This is a ceramic.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

Sounds more like the perennial "10 years in the future" techs, like memsistors, cold fusion, holographic storage, and so on.

bardak• 3 years ago

Just to be a bit of a realist do we know if this material is malleable or practical to make intifrates circuits? Is it possible to make large single pieces of it? Don't get me wrong even if the awnser to all of these is no it's still probably the biggest single material science breakthrough since the transistors but we aren't necessarily going to be applicable to all the theoretical applications of semiconductors

Vicinity9635• 3 years ago

The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling.

No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."

r2_pilot2• 3 years ago

Ha, I just posted about a dragonfly I saw while walking, and how it seemed unperturbed by the possibility of room temperature superconductors on Earth. I added that I should probably learn from the dragonfly.

bipop5000• 3 years ago

Hoverboards. I want those damn things as was prophesied by back to the future.

iancmceachern2• 3 years ago

What things are we going to do with this material in the next 5 years? What things that I buy and use will be made better?

burnished4• 3 years ago

You know those joke buzzer/shocker rings? Well, they're going to get really, really good.

Riledcat• 3 years ago

We won’t be getting long distance high voltage electricity transmission lines made of this (possible) room temperature superconductor for the same reasons we don’t have high voltage long distance electricity transmission made of gold, a much better conductor than copper.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

To kill your buzz:

Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc.

You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates.

One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.

robotguy• 3 years ago

Reminds me of a story: I was in college physics in fall '89 and our professor was telling us how he and his son spent the summer in Alaska prospecting for whatever material was all the rage in superconductors at the time. He was explaining that when superconductors broke the liquid nitrogen temperature, it was a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid nitrogen is cheaper than beer."

To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"

xwdv2• 3 years ago

What’s the next big tech in the tech tree after room temp superconductors?

trailingComma• 3 years ago

Cold fusion, after containment with superconductors becomes easy.

feoren2• 3 years ago

Applied Relativity (Discover 5), then Photon/Wave Mechanics (Conquer 6), Probability Mechanics (Build 7), and Nanometallurgy (Explore 8). Once we also discover Organic Superlubricant (Conquer 7), we'll get to Matter Compression (Conquer 9).

Organic superlube!? Oh, it's great stuff! Great stuff.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

Someone posted this in a comment on another post of LK-99: Wouldn't the first step be verification before replication? I.e. have the original authors send out some LK-99 samples to other researchers to at least confirm "Yes, this thing is a high temperature superconductor". Wouldn't matter even that much if it were made with unicorn dust: it would be proof that high temperature superconductors are even possible, which is itself a huge, huge deal.

After that replication of production of LK-99 would of course be critical, but just proving it exists should alone be enough for grand celebration.

xtracto• 3 years ago

This LK99 thing all sounds to me very similar to the Podkletnov Gravity Shielding experiments of the 1990s . There may be something, but the mainstreet media is blowing it out of proportions. Some scientists may get hurt for this.

postalrat2• 3 years ago

I haven't seen much of anything on the mainstream media. Just here in hn and other tech sites. Are you making this up?

TillE• 3 years ago

Because unless all current replication attempts fail, it would be totally pointless.

I know we're all eager for news, but there's no urgent need to verify the claims. That's not how science works. Give it a couple weeks.

Exuma2• 3 years ago

Has that German scientist that answered like an asshole ever posted a reply yet? I want to see what some of the aggressive nay-sayers are saying now. I love this bit of schadenfreude.

djha-skin• 3 years ago

Hug of death https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1sARgr7qWQdkRKfToEZJIm-1XVsbq...

tnecniv• 3 years ago

I posted this elsewhere but I think it was after comments got merged in here, so sorry for the spam if you happen to see it twice:

I’m interested to know if anyone has any recommended resources on DFT or DDFT (the simulation method used here) for someone with good applied math knowledge but who is not a physicist. I have a decent working knowledge of stat mech from knowing about dynamical systems and information theory, but I am not a physicist. I’ve come across (classical) DFT before, but the tutorial papers I’ve come across get weighed down by a lot of physics jargon and notation that I don’t understand and they describe it in terms of certain physical systems that obfuscate whether I can adapt the method to problems I am interested (I think the answer is yes in my case but if I was confident I wouldn’t be asking). I could just rederive (classical) D or DDFT for my stochastic process, and that is likely the best way to learn it, but having a resource that is written more from the perspective of dynamical systems than a physicist would speed the process up quite a bit!

JINYIN• 3 years ago

awsome，man，这是我丁真的独享时刻

royibernthal• 3 years ago

Fascinating stuff :)

danielrangel• 3 years ago

Are we superconducting yet?

keepamovin2• 3 years ago

Apart from levitation and resistance, free conductivity, what are superconductors really good for? Like how could an iPhone become better with super conductive room temperature materials?

bobsmooth• 3 years ago

Imagine if every doctor's office had an MRI machine and they were a fraction of the size they are now.

yinser• 3 years ago

And they had 12x the resolution.

576576gdgdgfd• 3 years ago

What's next is amazing.

You wouldn't had believed it if I had told you a month ago.

King-Aaron• 3 years ago

Are these guys just trolling?

They reference Dr Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent. The spaceship guy. Surely they're trying to stir the pot with that.

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537A1/en

eps• 3 years ago

"Cited by examiner"

mikhailfranco2• 3 years ago

Is this material structure improbable enough that it raises the question of reverse engineered UAP debris :)

perlgeek• 3 years ago

JaggerJo• 3 years ago

What fields would directly benefit from this?

Would buying quantum computing stocks be a good idea now?

anshumankmr4• 3 years ago

Damn,literally blasting the Oppenheimer soundtrack at full volume while reading this... Exciting time to be alive. Hope the hype is worth it..

acat• 3 years ago

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2SR8DFQ

A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

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