Guys, even if everything in this paper is true, the material as it is might have limited applications.
From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA).
This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution".
Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool!
You can improve the current density a lot if you can make a single crystal, or at least make your crystal grains larger.
Impure superconductor samples often come out as a spongy mixture of superconducting and non-superconducting bits, the critical current is limited because less then 25% of the cross section is actually carrying current. When I was DIYing YBCO this is what happened most of the time. Every now and then you would get a good one.
edit: Actually if you look at the sample picture in the paper on page 7, it looks like spongy crap. Nobel prize winning spongy crap, but still. I would expect the numbers to improve as better crystal growing methods are found.
Yeah, it’s been a pretty solid trend line, new superconductor, first batch is usually kinda shitty, but proves the basics, refining the mix nails down its exact performance characteristics.
It’s spongy grainy crap indeed… but as long as their analysis holds up to scrutiny and replication… and whoa boy do I bet there are people already trying to replicate this result as I’m typing my reply and reading the rest of the comments…. As long as the results hold up and this isn’t an abnormally low performing superconductor… i have no doubt this is going to win a Nobel prize. This has been the prize for a long time in this whole discipline, and they may have finally nailed it.
We as a species may be on the bring of a revolutionary step forward in what we can achieve in engineering and science. Better instruments and more powerful or sophisticated motors and power systems. It’s heady stuff to think it may happen in my lifetime.
Can you? The proposed model implies this relies on non-periodic impurities to achieve superconductivity, and the displayed strength is consistent with superconductivity only appearing on some places spread inside the material. This seems qualitatively different from YBCO.
I don't know enough to be sure on the certainty of that model, but it seems well supported. So I'd be surprised if only improving the material quality was enough to make it strong.
They've just proven (if true of course) that it's possible at all. That is a massive, massive leap.
And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.
I was with you on the first part. If this proves room-temperature/ambient-pressure is possible at all, that is huge.
Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
Many years ago, as an undergrad, I was telling a grad student friend how I'd been learning about the Selection algorithm- it lets you pick the Kth largest element from an unsorted list in linear time, which is pretty neat.
I said "It's O(n), but the constant is ridiculous in most implementations so it's usually better just to sort and then pick the kth element". The grad student friend said something that stuck with me: "Sure, but the algorithm proves it's possible to find the kth element in linear time. That was never guaranteed. Now we just need to find a better way to do it."
Random conversation that stuck with me, and they probably forgot it a moment later.
I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form) had a field trip to Culham and also a double lesson/lecture done by a handful of Culham physicists back in school. I am very aware of what a privilege that was.
Now I'm 53 and been around the block a bit, I really appreciate how time is required for some things. A lot of time.
Superconductivity was first observed in solid mercury at a temperature of 4.19 Kelvin in 1911, not long after liquid helium was first produced in 1908.
The 1980's discoveries were of the first "high temperature" superconductors (where "high temperature" means "above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen").
Liquid nitrogen is much easier to deal with than liquid helium.
Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups.
I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).
Very true. I remember cheering since the mid 80's every time the temperature for superconductivity went up, sometimes with 20 degrees K in one go. And then it was quiet for a long long time with a plateau. More recently, two major jumps, the last one of > 50 degrees (2017, H2S), and now this...
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 once superconductors broke the liquid helium temperature, it was going to be a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid helium is cheaper than beer."
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
I'd use it for making my own SQUIDs[1], as a start. There are a number of experiments I want to do, and things I want to understand[2][3], and not having to have cryogenics keeping the detectors cold would be helpful.
I'd also like to use this for antennas, transmission lines, and tuned cavities.[4] There are a lot of things you could do at VLF frequencies[5] that require long, long wires... with lots of resistance, unless you have a defense budget, the resistance eats into efficiency. Superconductors could help deal with that.
Just for comparison, an typical MRI magnet is 1.5 Tesla. An NMR spectrometer can go up to 28 Tesla (using new high-temperature superconductors). The LHC magnets are around 8 Tesla.
Those are the kinds of magnetic fields the classic superconductors and the newer high-temperature superconductors can achieve.
> the material as it is might have limited applications
Is LK-99 part of a larger (either known or emerging) class of materials? I'm not understanding what the lead and copper ions are doing to create internal stress, and why that leads to superconductivity.
Pb(2)-phosphate is a crystalline compound. They are creating a 2D film of it using vapor deposition, then doping it with copper ions. This is a standard process in semiconductor manufacturing. There are room temperature ambient pressure materials doped to create quantum wells in production right now. They are not super conductors, because the quantum wells are merely impurities that reduce the resistance of the material. I believe this paper is claiming a crystal so saturated with quantum wells that it conducts primarily through quantum wells with almost no resistance (and that all of the other physical properties of a superconductor arise from this).
Just like in previous super conductor findings once a material is made and understood that usually paves the way to new discoveries, sometimes those are (big) improvements on the status quo. I'd expect this finding - assuming it is true and verified - to result in massive funding towards the material science labs to try to improve on it. So I'd say this is example '1' of a new class of materials and if it holds up then probably we will find more members of that class once the mechanisms are understood.
For some reason, there’s a contingent of people that think that by poking holes and pooh-poohing things, it gives them clout. It happens far too often in tech and I hate it. Look how often the post has “can’t” or “couldn’t”.
Instead of giving reasons why something sucks, how about being supportive and talking about why it’s awesome and what possibilities this opens up?
I don't think OP is being overly negative in relation to the tone of the rest of the comments here. Nobody else up until this comment had mentioned anything about the actual important performance characteristics that the paper's authors' are claiming, and this does put it into perspective with the current state of the art. And OP does even end on an optimistic note anyway. No need to resort to personal attacks.
Edit: I appreciate you toning down the more combative part of your comment.
While I often agree that the tone on these kinds of posts on HN is often annoyingly and unproductively cynical, I think him just pointing out the current limitations of the result is not that much of a problem. It isn't like he's making the overused "perpetually 20 years away" joke about potentially revolutionary technologies.
How powerful is the magnetic field in typical brushless motor? Even if it can’t be used for an MRI machine, it could do wonders for efficient (and/or compact) robotics and electric vehicles.
I’m also very curious what kind of inductors you could make for switching power supplies using superconductors.
You could probably do that but it wouldn't be a whole lot better than the existing traces: it's not usually the resistance that limits the size of circuit traces but the mechanical requirements, such as your ability to connect to them and to space them apart so you don't get crosstalk due to capacitive or inductive coupling.
If you could use it to make circuits, especially of a high level of integration then it might well be something much more interesting (Josephson tunneling is briefly mentioned in the article). That could theoretically give rise to very efficient switching gear and if it can be miniaturized enough to efficient CPUs and memory. This is because the typical transistor uses power mostly in the time between the transition between the 'on' state and the 'off' state, when it is acting as a resistor. If you could get rid of that resistance during the transition then you might be able to reduce the amount of power a given circuit uses, but there are still lower limits off losses that you won't be able to escape, so it will not make your CPU magically use zero energy.
Given the contents of the paper such applications are a very long way off and may in fact never happen. Let's first see (1) if it is true and (2) if it is true how well it stacks up against copper wire of the same diameter and commercially available super conductors in terms of cost and practical current carrying capability. If that's all good then this will really be a game changer.
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 showing levitation at room temperature and
atmospheric pressure and mechanism: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf
The actual picture of (poor) levitation in the paper you linked is pretty compelling. This isn’t a complex, noisy measurement showing something that’s related to superconductivity — this is a magnet and a supposed superconductor repelling each other.
As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t notice), electrets (seems pretty unlikely here), very extreme amounts of static charge (again, seems unlikely), and actual superconductivity (would be awesome).
Random bits of cooked oxides, ceramics, and such don’t float on a magnet.
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".
Lead is used everywhere. Not in paint anymore but you can buy lead weights at hardware stores. Don't grind it up and put it in your muni water supply, but it's a household substance that is harmful if ingested, like many others.
As for how to avoid lead poisoning, coat the lead with a thin layer of some substance, perhaps a plastic or rubber that doesn’t affect its magnetic capabilities.
Or perhaps they can galvanize it with safer metal, leaving a really small part exposed.
Cobalt is way more toxic than lead and yet every consumer grade lithium ion battery contains it. The fact something is toxic is not that important. What is that we manage the end of life for the products it contains responsibly.
> Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure
Is it late April Fools joke?
It can’t be true.
Edit: I am not surprised it levitates. I am astonished by how much it will reshape our world if it is real room-temp and ambient-pressure superconductor. Also is easy to produce. Just too good to be true.
Levitation is to be expected for any superconductor when it's in a superconducting state; that part is banal. The big question is whether it's actually a superconductor at RTP. Their results are strong enough that it's unlikely to be a mistake, though fraud is possible too (although it is so easily uncovered given the simplicity of preparing the material and the strength of the reported effects that fraud seems almost pointless since it'll be uncovered immediately).
Superconductors will typically levitate if placed above a magnet, and vice versa. Magnets are weird--superconductors even more so. I assume that's what they were referring to?
Edit: Judging by Fig 4, which has a large object conspicuously labeled "magnet", that's probably what they're referring to.
The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals).
If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days.
If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster.
Given the materials and methods involved it really isn’t that dangerous. With basic precautions I’d say go for it, worst case is honestly just blowing a few hundred bucks. If this pans out, there will definitely be some do it yourself tutorials on YouTube in the coming weeks.
Seriously, people should stop panicking about lead that much. You know there is this fairly common hobby people have, it's called casting bullets. With lead. I've done it, I know many people that do it regularly and they're all fine.
Furthermore, shooting ranges are full of lead in the ground. The laws around here(Poland) require a cleanup by specialised companies every few years and a concrete slab to separate the lead/soil mix from the groundwater near the targets, but still there are tons of the stuff just sitting there for years and no one gets hurt. Fun fact. These specialised cleanup companies don't cost anything for big ranges. They're either free, or they pay the shooting club that owns the range money, because the lead they recover is worth a lot.
Is the superconductivity present in the powder? Or does it require vapor deposition?
If the latter, it implies a cloth versus fibre topology, which forces an interesting rethink of many paradigms forced by the ductility of our present conductors.
A sister paper [0] has a photo of the material exhibiting the Meisner effect and levitating over a magnet, and claims to have a video too.
Either they blatantly photoshopped the photo or they actually made a room temperature super conductor. I can’t see how the could have made a subtle mistake that resulted in magnetic levitation at room temp without making a superconductor.
Indeed, this will change pretty much everything if true. A true room temperature / ambient pressure superconductor will cause a revolution in so many fields that I find it hard to believe. But if... Let's wait for replication before throwing a party. This is on par with the discovery of the transistor and possibly bigger.
> I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
It's on arXiv, which is a preprint journal, which means it has no peer-review; and is therefore generally less trustworthy (especially when the paper has no connection to a technical conference or is not being published elsewhere, and is in a non-computer science or mathematics field).
In addition to this, claims of room-temperature superconductors have been mired in controversy or otherwise proven false:
Considering that many fraudulent claims of room-temperature superconductivity have gotten into Nature and other top-tier publications, I would wait for multiple independent recreations of the results in the paper.
Is there an alternative explanation possible for the video? Couldn't it just be a magnetized piece of ferrite that is magnetized in a weird way causing it to lift up like that on a strong magnet?
I'll get this out of the way first: I'm a couch scientist (even that is probably stretching it).
That said, from the video it mentions the superconductor was applied as a film over copper. But wouldn't plain copper also exhibit this effect due to eddy currents? I fail to see how the (supposedly) thin film is affecting the plate in this experiment. I'm probably missing something and I hope someone can enlighten me.
In a normal conducting material eddy currents dissipate relatively quickly. The shard of material in the magnet video appears to be floating quite stably for dozens of seconds, which implies that eddy currents are not being dissipated. I'm personally excited, I think it's the real deal but with some limits on maximum field strength and current
Ohh ... this could actually be relatively big.
From abstract: "The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage"
There was previously research done investigating how changes in atomic structural alignment affect superconductivity (such as by cooling). I think researchers were trying to maintain the spacing that superconductors had while cool even when it was heated up. This sounds line with that other research, though I can't find the article again, please correct me if you find otherwise.
Still likely to be rather fragile and temperamental to work with ... but this seems like it's possibly legit.
Yes! That was exactly what I was thinking of! I love one of the comments - "But might this physical stretching then also allow room temperature superconductors, if not why not?"
They were thinking of stretching at a macro scale (like bending a bar of stuff), rather than essentially "stretching" at the chemical scale which is what I understand they did here. Super cool!
The graphs on page 3 are exactly what you would expect with a real superconductor. The current/voltage/temp relationship especially. In fact I don't see how you get graphs that look like that unless you either created a superconductor or are just blatantly making up the data. This could be enormous.
My first thought was “I really hope this is real and not someone having left the data collection software in simulation mode.” If this reproduces, it’s historic. If it doesn’t, it’s either cold fusion or faster-than-light neutrinos.
Lots of problems with the paper, they claim. It is not up to the standards of current SC research. One of them says Dias's work shows more merit than this.
All valid points but just below that comment someone asked if he/she was reading the new paper (apparently there's an older paper), he/she didn't respond/haven't responded yet.
His criticism of figure 1b doesn't seem reasonable to me, given that the are resistance measurements in 1a and 1c that show zero resistance coming and going in roughly the expected way as a function of temperature and magnetic field. Unlikely that the connections would break and reconnect in just the right way.
big if true. far from a chemistry expert here, but synthesis looks basically trivial (if you consider 10e-5 torr vacuum to be trivial), and the materials are readily available. hell, from the instructions alone i could probably make it at home.
i mean the search space is unfathomably large, so i suppose it’s possible that something like this exists, but the paper quality itself doesn’t.. spark joy? :)
i’ll maintain a healthy level of skepticism until some real materials scientists opine and/or someone else is able to reproduce.
I've made YBCO superconductors in my garage many times and the solid state synthesis method in the paper is very similar to that used by hobbyists. In fact, it seems to not require the usual careful slow annealing under flowing oxygen.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if even simpler methods are feasible.
For instance, there's a rapid synthesis method for YBCO that uses a small alumina boat, some glass wool, a residential 800w microwave oven, and slightly modified mixture of precursors to allow free oxygen to be liberated in the mixture during heating and trapped in the wool around the sample so you don't need to rig an oxygen concentrator up. IIRC it only takes about 15 minutes to prepare a sample.
This is extremely exciting! I've read hundreds of papers on superconductor manufacture and testing over the years and this has all the hallmarks of legitimacy, at least from my citizen-mad-scientist perspective.
I've looked briefly at the materials synthesis (first part of their Supplementary Materials section). I agree with you, the synthesis is trivial. The 10e-5 vacuum is easily reached with a turbopump backed by a mechanical pump, nothing exotic or expensive.
indeed, and i wonder if you could elide the vacuum entirely with a noble gas (presuming the vacuum is required to avoid reactions with atmospheric gases)
Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 10E-6/10E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings.
Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 1E-6/1E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings.
My little e-gun experiments are all done with a Alcatel Pascal 2008 and I can achieve ~3E-3 with just that pump. I'm building a bigger system with a VHS4 diffusion pump w/cold trap that should get me into -6 territory easily.
well.. my understanding is that the difficulty with those projects is converting fast moving neutrons into electricity without degrading the material.. :)
but a room-temperature superconductor would certainly lower the operating costs of all of the prototype fusion reactors that currently exist.
Readit News
From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA).
This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution".
Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool!
Impure superconductor samples often come out as a spongy mixture of superconducting and non-superconducting bits, the critical current is limited because less then 25% of the cross section is actually carrying current. When I was DIYing YBCO this is what happened most of the time. Every now and then you would get a good one.
See this patent for growing single crystals of YBCO. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6046139A/en
edit: Actually if you look at the sample picture in the paper on page 7, it looks like spongy crap. Nobel prize winning spongy crap, but still. I would expect the numbers to improve as better crystal growing methods are found.
It’s spongy grainy crap indeed… but as long as their analysis holds up to scrutiny and replication… and whoa boy do I bet there are people already trying to replicate this result as I’m typing my reply and reading the rest of the comments…. As long as the results hold up and this isn’t an abnormally low performing superconductor… i have no doubt this is going to win a Nobel prize. This has been the prize for a long time in this whole discipline, and they may have finally nailed it.
We as a species may be on the bring of a revolutionary step forward in what we can achieve in engineering and science. Better instruments and more powerful or sophisticated motors and power systems. It’s heady stuff to think it may happen in my lifetime.
I don't know enough to be sure on the certainty of that model, but it seems well supported. So I'd be surprised if only improving the material quality was enough to make it strong.
And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.
Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
I said "It's O(n), but the constant is ridiculous in most implementations so it's usually better just to sort and then pick the kth element". The grad student friend said something that stuck with me: "Sure, but the algorithm proves it's possible to find the kth element in linear time. That was never guaranteed. Now we just need to find a better way to do it."
Random conversation that stuck with me, and they probably forgot it a moment later.
I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form) had a field trip to Culham and also a double lesson/lecture done by a handful of Culham physicists back in school. I am very aware of what a privilege that was.
Now I'm 53 and been around the block a bit, I really appreciate how time is required for some things. A lot of time.
The 1980's discoveries were of the first "high temperature" superconductors (where "high temperature" means "above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen").
Liquid nitrogen is much easier to deal with than liquid helium.
I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
I'd also like to use this for antennas, transmission lines, and tuned cavities.[4] There are a lot of things you could do at VLF frequencies[5] that require long, long wires... with lots of resistance, unless you have a defense budget, the resistance eats into efficiency. Superconductors could help deal with that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_wave#Electromagne...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_radio_frequenc...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency#Amateur_use
Those are the kinds of magnetic fields the classic superconductors and the newer high-temperature superconductors can achieve.
Is LK-99 part of a larger (either known or emerging) class of materials? I'm not understanding what the lead and copper ions are doing to create internal stress, and why that leads to superconductivity.
For some reason, there’s a contingent of people that think that by poking holes and pooh-poohing things, it gives them clout. It happens far too often in tech and I hate it. Look how often the post has “can’t” or “couldn’t”.
Instead of giving reasons why something sucks, how about being supportive and talking about why it’s awesome and what possibilities this opens up?
Edit: I appreciate you toning down the more combative part of your comment.
I’m also very curious what kind of inductors you could make for switching power supplies using superconductors.
It would be super room temperature
Deleted Comment
If you could use it to make circuits, especially of a high level of integration then it might well be something much more interesting (Josephson tunneling is briefly mentioned in the article). That could theoretically give rise to very efficient switching gear and if it can be miniaturized enough to efficient CPUs and memory. This is because the typical transistor uses power mostly in the time between the transition between the 'on' state and the 'off' state, when it is acting as a resistor. If you could get rid of that resistance during the transition then you might be able to reduce the amount of power a given circuit uses, but there are still lower limits off losses that you won't be able to escape, so it will not make your CPU magically use zero energy.
Given the contents of the paper such applications are a very long way off and may in fact never happen. Let's first see (1) if it is true and (2) if it is true how well it stacks up against copper wire of the same diameter and commercially available super conductors in terms of cost and practical current carrying capability. If that's all good then this will really be a game changer.
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 showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf
2. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&hl=en
3. Mott transition in VO2 revealed by infrared spectroscopy and nano-imaging: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
As far as I know, that’s possible with permanent magnets (and it would be weird, but not impossible, if the group instead synthesized a novel ferromagnet and didn’t notice), electrets (seems pretty unlikely here), very extreme amounts of static charge (again, seems unlikely), and actual superconductivity (would be awesome).
Random bits of cooked oxides, ceramics, and such don’t float on a magnet.
Most people aren't licking the insides of their computer processors, fusion reactors, radio telescopes and MRIs.
Not being in sciences I can’t tell if this sentence is legit or you just got a good joke in there
As for how to avoid lead poisoning, coat the lead with a thin layer of some substance, perhaps a plastic or rubber that doesn’t affect its magnetic capabilities.
Or perhaps they can galvanize it with safer metal, leaving a really small part exposed.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Is it late April Fools joke?
It can’t be true.
Edit: I am not surprised it levitates. I am astonished by how much it will reshape our world if it is real room-temp and ambient-pressure superconductor. Also is easy to produce. Just too good to be true.
Edit: Judging by Fig 4, which has a large object conspicuously labeled "magnet", that's probably what they're referring to.
If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days.
If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster.
Hopefully it repros.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf page 3
Really.
It's more likely that you will contaminate your land, and possibly your neighbors land too than that you will manage to replicate it.
(Which would effectively make a bizarre form of brass a superconductor)
Deleted Comment
Furthermore, shooting ranges are full of lead in the ground. The laws around here(Poland) require a cleanup by specialised companies every few years and a concrete slab to separate the lead/soil mix from the groundwater near the targets, but still there are tons of the stuff just sitting there for years and no one gets hurt. Fun fact. These specialised cleanup companies don't cost anything for big ranges. They're either free, or they pay the shooting club that owns the range money, because the lead they recover is worth a lot.
I wouldn't call it an easy process, but it's achievable without highly specialized equipment. Just a torch and a vacuum pump.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE
Deleted Comment
If the latter, it implies a cloth versus fibre topology, which forces an interesting rethink of many paradigms forced by the ductility of our present conductors.
Deleted Comment
True.
> and permanently for the better.
You can't know that.
Either they blatantly photoshopped the photo or they actually made a room temperature super conductor. I can’t see how the could have made a subtle mistake that resulted in magnetic levitation at room temp without making a superconductor.
[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
It's on arXiv, which is a preprint journal, which means it has no peer-review; and is therefore generally less trustworthy (especially when the paper has no connection to a technical conference or is not being published elsewhere, and is in a non-computer science or mathematics field).
In addition to this, claims of room-temperature superconductors have been mired in controversy or otherwise proven false:
- http://www.superconductors.org/roomnano.htm (2004)
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11443 (2012)
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-superconductor-... (2018)
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/room-temperature-superconduct... (2020)
- https://forbetterscience.com/2023/03/29/superconductive-frau... (2022-2023)
Considering that many fraudulent claims of room-temperature superconductivity have gotten into Nature and other top-tier publications, I would wait for multiple independent recreations of the results in the paper.
The video headline says: "Magnetic Property Test of LK-99 Film".
That's how copper acts with a moving super magnet[0], so the video doesn't really show anything.
[0] https://youtu.be/KrH3t1H6fOc?t=50
Given the apparent size/strength of the magnets, you could probably replicate that with a silver coin
I agree with swamp40: the video you linked is not demonstrating the Meissner effect, and is just showing Lenz's law.
That said, from the video it mentions the superconductor was applied as a film over copper. But wouldn't plain copper also exhibit this effect due to eddy currents? I fail to see how the (supposedly) thin film is affecting the plate in this experiment. I'm probably missing something and I hope someone can enlighten me.
There was previously research done investigating how changes in atomic structural alignment affect superconductivity (such as by cooling). I think researchers were trying to maintain the spacing that superconductors had while cool even when it was heated up. This sounds line with that other research, though I can't find the article again, please correct me if you find otherwise.
Still likely to be rather fragile and temperamental to work with ... but this seems like it's possibly legit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479776
They were thinking of stretching at a macro scale (like bending a bar of stuff), rather than essentially "stretching" at the chemical scale which is what I understand they did here. Super cool!
Deleted Comment
Lots of problems with the paper, they claim. It is not up to the standards of current SC research. One of them says Dias's work shows more merit than this.
Either way we should hear from people trying to replicate it soon.
Nevertheless I'm still quite skeptical.
i mean the search space is unfathomably large, so i suppose it’s possible that something like this exists, but the paper quality itself doesn’t.. spark joy? :)
i’ll maintain a healthy level of skepticism until some real materials scientists opine and/or someone else is able to reproduce.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if even simpler methods are feasible.
For instance, there's a rapid synthesis method for YBCO that uses a small alumina boat, some glass wool, a residential 800w microwave oven, and slightly modified mixture of precursors to allow free oxygen to be liberated in the mixture during heating and trapped in the wool around the sample so you don't need to rig an oxygen concentrator up. IIRC it only takes about 15 minutes to prepare a sample.
This is extremely exciting! I've read hundreds of papers on superconductor manufacture and testing over the years and this has all the hallmarks of legitimacy, at least from my citizen-mad-scientist perspective.
I guess this will be replicated/not pretty soon then.
Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 10E-6/10E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings.
Its not hard to achieve at all. Electron beam welders at work have 1E-6/1E-7 in the E-gun chamber all day long held by a little turbo or diffusion pump. The chambers aren't made from anything exotic just stainless steel and/or aluminum with viton o-rings.
My little e-gun experiments are all done with a Alcatel Pascal 2008 and I can achieve ~3E-3 with just that pump. I'm building a bigger system with a VHS4 diffusion pump w/cold trap that should get me into -6 territory easily.
This seems way too good to be true. But hope that it actuaoly is true.
but a room-temperature superconductor would certainly lower the operating costs of all of the prototype fusion reactors that currently exist.