Superconductor megathread
Hey everyone,
As a few of you may know, there was a paper released a few days ago claiming that an Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (RTAPS) was created. You can see the original paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
To bring things into perspective if this holds true we would likely dispense with energy and transportation concerns. It would be akin to the discovery of fire, penicillin or the transistor. A groundbreaking change. See here for a more detailed, bullish list of things it can help with: https://nitter.net/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936
There are many communities that are discussing this. The best summary I was able to find is here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-17
There is still a very much active debate there (and elsewhere online) of people on the viability of the original people. Many are pessimistic that the evidence is scant and that the original publication does not hold its water. An interesting summary of the sentiment of a part of the community can be found through the (faux) betting market of Manifold here: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre
On the link above they are also diligently tracking any replication attempts. Currently we are at the stage were theoretical simulations have validated the possibility of the purported materials to be superconductors (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892).
Finally, a nice replication attempt that tried to make the creation process better and demonstrated some of the effects required to prove superconductivity (scroll up): https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685804254718459904
This is very exciting, because even if some properties are valid, it gives a mjor boost to the whole field.
It seems like the correct thing to do as far as not wasting your time would be to ignore this for a month and then see if scientists still think it’s promising? But for people who want to follow along, this looks like a good summary:
A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments
Even if you want to follow along, I think it’s a good idea not to spend too much time speculating about the implications because it could all turn out to be a false alarm, as has happened before.
That sounds about right honestly. Discoveries like the LHC and Higgs, or LIGO and grav waves had a meticulous verification process over months (i.e. people on the grapevine often knew about the upcoming announcement weeks in advance even if it wasn't public knowledge) so you could basically buy into the discovery news right away. This however (at best) seems like a few small teams making recent breakthroughs and then throwing their findings on arXiv at warp speed to not get scooped. Assuming everyone is acting in good faith, that sort of swiftness can easily introduce mistakes. Luckily, the kind of superconductor they've potentially discovered can be made by most any materials science lab in the world so we'll definitely know relatively soon. Best wait for independent verification from other groups as well as peer review on these preprints.
IMO a website that does this could be a really cool service. Like, suppose Tildes had a tag that said "let's revisit this in [6 months?] and see if it panned out", and if a post is hit with that tag heavily enough, it's auto-reposted with a title saying "hey, did this pan out?: [title]" in 6 months.
Or perhaps it auto-prompts a tech/science journalist on the topic. (I'm spitballing here on what would be useful, please don't nitpick practicality like "Tildes doesn't have a journalism department!".)
I know Reddit has (had?) the RemindMe bot, but that's an individual action. I think often we, as a community, more-or-less all know that something can't really be discussed until time has passed but then all forget about it until something brings it back into the spotlight. Like graphene. Graphene is in a few high-end batteries now, I think.
Yeah this happens constantly. I read some article about some breakthrough, I promptly ignore it and forget it exists and then lo and behold this world changing discovery has just disappeared off the face of the planet.
As usual, wake me up when this technology is commercially abundant because sometimes the breakthroughs are real but the economics don’t make sense and it just fizzles out anyway. Scientifically interesting maybe, but no impact for an average Joe like me.
If, however, you want to do the exact opposite of this extremely reasonable advice, you can follow the condensed matter arxiv postings here:
Expect the listing to be updated once per day (excluding weekends/holidays).
Edit: it's probably better to follow this subtopic instead:
Serious note: I'm surprised how many people do just this and trawl arXiv postings religiously.
In my field at least, we usually get fewer than 10 new submissions per day, so it isn't much work to stay abreast of the most recent work. Of course, if you tried to read every submission, you'd be scrutinizing a few hundred pages of technical writing every day, and then you'd never get anything done.
I mostly read astro-ph and hep-ph so browsing the titles is about the only sustainable way to do it.
I'm not a scientist, and it's been a long while since I studied any. Can someone please ELI5, what is a superconductor, and why is this discovery so earth shattering?
You can find a link on my OP regarding the (amazing) implications of such a discovery. A thread that explains this very nciely is this: https://nitter.net/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936
Sounds like this could rapidly obsolete fossil fuels, which is honestly the only way we’re getting off of them. For that reason I hope it’s real.
Would this also have benefits for "classic" computers? For example, could a CPU made from super-conducting circuitry eliminate a large chunk of heat generation, and allow it to run much faster with less power? Or is there another bottleneck in place (logic gates?) that stops this?
Most of the power in a processor is wasted across the wires between the transistors and most of that is wasted in a small number of those wires. PDF
That trend has been increasing for a number of years. Processors contain miles of copper wire.
I think the biggest challenge is figuring out how to fabricate new materials and reliably get them on silicon. We used aluminum instead of copper wires in processors for a long time, even though aluminum is inferior, just because it stuck to the silicon better and we couldn't figure out a way to make copper work. Any defects become very significant when you're working on the nano scale.
I did a project investigating the feasibility of using optical (or plasmomic) interconnects to replace copper. Heat wasted on interconnects is such a glaring and frustrating problem because it's so simple to understand yet hard to fix.
Thanks! So even if this turns out to be the real deal, it might be of no use for those technologies if they can't make it stick to the silicon waivers.
A superconductor is a material which expels magnetic fields and has a resistivity of nearly zero (and thus a very high conductivity). This lets you do things like magnetic levitation and thus "frictionless movement" if you want to move something along a track. They also can transport of huge amounts of electrical current with minimal losses to make incredibly powerful magnets very efficiently which have all sorts of industrial and medical applications -- many of which we use today like in MRI machines. The problem is all known superconductors have to be chilled to very low temperatures to work (or very high pressures) which limits their applications to places which can regularly supply cooling like with liquid nitrogen. A room temperature superconductor would not have this limitation allowing us to put them anywhere and everywhere.
Whenever you use wire to move electricity, the wires themselves resist the flow a little bit and act like the electric heaters you might put in your home. This means that electricity is wasted creating heat where you don't want it. Not only does this cost, but it limits transportability because you effectively have a leaky bucket. It's also a pain managing all this heat where you don't want it meaning things like computers need fans and phones get noticeably hot when you use them intently.
Superconductors have zero resistance, so zero wasted electricity as heat. This also means you can transport it vast distances without wasting any or make it go around in circles, which is then a sort of battery that doesn't go flat.
And you can make things like motors and turbines much more efficient too.
Previous superconductors needed to be seriously cold or under incredible pressures. This one purportedly works at room temperature (and much hotter) and normal pressures.
The Wikipedia actually has a dedicated article about applications. It’s a fun rabbit hole to go down.
The authors submitted a second revision of the six-author paper to the arxiv on Saturday, but the only difference appears to be Figure 4. If I understand this figure correctly, it seems like they corrected the units and overlaid some additional information (e.g., the weights of the samples).
Personally I found the revision to be a bit disappointing. The first draft was obviously rushed (it appears that one of the would-be authors forced their hand); meanwhile, I'm sure the groups trying to recreate this material right now would appreciate a more thorough description of the fabrication process.
Personally don't trust anime profile pic "replications", waiting to see if a reputable university publishes something.
Partial agreement; my main problem with the 'replication' was that they only showed a picture of a grain of (presumably) LK-99 floating inside of a glass tube above a magnet. But they did not want to provide a video, but nonetheless happily boasted about their achievement whilst ridiculing "western scientists" for failing to do what they did in their kitchen.
It could be legitimate, but I just don't buy it yet lol. It could just as well be stuck inside the tube.
However the guy from Varda space seems trustworthy to me.
Who from Varda offered details on this? Delian?
andrewmccalip on
TwitterX is sharing his efforts replicating the paper resultsI've been following this rather intently since the initial arXiv leak last Wednesday, and I'm over the moon. Still extremely skeptical, to be clear, but if I had to put a number on it, I'm up to a ~5-10% chance of thinking the superconductivity claims will actually pan out. That said, I also think there's a >80% chance they've legitimately found a novel strongly-diamagnetic material, which is still REALLY cool in my book.
Here are some of the latest developments from this morning:
For transparency, I have a bachelor's in physics (i.e. basic understanding of E&M/QM/chemical synthesis), but claim zero expertise in the realms of matsci and superconductors.
E: I'm using "replication" very loosely here btw - these videos are showing preliminary experimentation with samples from replication attempts; they're not replicating superconductivity.
Based on the latest updates, I'm now leaning towards thinking it's more likely than not that the room-temp, ambient pressure superconductivity claims will in fact pan out. Wouldn't bet my savings on it anytime soon, but there's good reason for optimism based on the news this week.
Recent developments:
Unfortunately, I think it'll be a good while before we get papers with solid resistivity readings published from multiple major institutions, due to synthesis woes - but it's been one helluva ride thus far!
There are diamagnetic materials which can levitate readily above magnets so the video while impressive isn't a slam dunk quite yet.
Also flux pinning should still let the superconductor rotate, so it's odd that they don't demonstrate this.
Ultimately, all of this is moot without high quality resistivity measurements. That nobody is producing those but spending their time with magnets is suspicious to me.
If you're saying that the video could be a hoax showing pyrolytic carbon, absolutely agreed.
But if we assume that it's LK-99, doesn't the strength of the effect demonstrated imply LK-99 is in the top 5 known strongest diamagnetic substances? Certainly looks like a stronger effect than I'd expect from bismuth or graphite even. I have a hard time chalking that dampening behavior up to diamagnetism alone for anything other than pyrolytic carbon, but that's a pure gut-check assessment and I could absolutely be mistaken.
And also agreed that it would be much more conclusive if rotation were shown, but doesn't that require a radially-symmetric B-field (unlike what a cube magnet would provide)?
I'm not necessarily saying it's a hoax, but that LK99 could be a very powerful diamagnetic substance but not necessarily superconducting.
They got to pick the magnets, if they wanted to be more convincing, they should make a better effort than a 10 second tiktok. The video was for hype, not to convince any scientists.
More directly, it should still rotate. That close to the magnet surface it is uniform enough not to matter much especially with so small a sample.
Sure, and that's why I gave the novel-diamagnetic hypothesis a lot of weight in my original comment.
When the options are that we've discovered a new diamagnetic compound that exceeds any other non-elemental substance by two orders of magnitude (more if you believe the authors of the original paper) OR it's a superconductor - suddenly I have a much easier time thinking it might be a superconductor.
Like you say though, it's now a matter of resistivity or GTFO.
No longer remotely optimistic after digesting this paper overnight.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf
In short, they made a proof-of-concept using the same base materials as LK-99, and make a compelling case that their samples show both diamagnetism and ferromagnetism at different field strengths, and that in strong fields, the ferromagnetism is enough to make the samples basically stand up on end (see Fig S2). It's been clear that something highly unusual has been going on with LK-99, and this is a pretty good theory of what that "something-unusual" might be that doesn't involve superconductivity.
(Disclaimer: I haven't wrapped my head around why flipping the magnet poles wouldn't reverse the orientation the samples are half-levitating in. Am I missing something there? I haven't had my coffee yet...)
This whole drama has been really interesting though, and I hope it can kick off some major R&D funding in the field!
Why do I get the feeling this 'discovery' is going to be another load of horse shit like all the clickbait "CANCER CURE DISCOVERED" headlines? The research isn't even peer-reviewed and was allegedly rushed out without every researcher's approval.
Even if we did find a superconductor that could operate at ambient room-temperature, then I really get the feeling there's going to be a caveat that will make it prohibitively expensive to produce and we'll just be back to producing good 'ole silicon circuits.
That’s probably still the way to bet, but it’s a shallow prediction. The outcome isn’t going to be based on vibes. The scientists who discovered this are likely pretty excited by it and that’s enough to explain their odd behavior.
Due to its relatively easy manufacturing process a lot of labs are trying to replicate so the turnaround time should be rather small.
A preprint from the arvix today suggests LK-99 could be a superconductor.
But the paper comes with a couple caveats:
Nevertheless, the new preprint details more thoroughly their fabrication process compared to the original authors, so hopefully that should make it easier for other groups to recreate this material.
As someone pointed out on /r/physics, (see: this discussion), this preprint (Fig. 3) might just be hitting their noise floor of their equipment as no transition is seen in the linear plotting of the data. In particular the Condensed Matter Theory Center at UofMaryland is pouring a lot of cold water over all of these forthcoming preprints for their sloppiness: https://twitter.com/condensed_the. The more this story develops, the more skeptical I'm becoming.
Yeah, I think skepticism is the right attitude here. Possibly you could explain away the lack of a clean phase transition in today's preprint, but at this point I think messy measurements is the more likely culprit, and I'm not sure how much credence we should give to unverified videos.
Personally I'm waiting for the results from Argonne. If they don't see any signs of superconductivity, I'm updating my priors from probably not a superconductor (35% - 50%) to almost certainly not a superconductor (<10%).
Interesting. Even new types of superconductors would be a step forward. Champagne bottle remains closed though, if it is a superconductor at the temperature of liquid nitrogen it'd already be amazing.
Sabine covered this in this week's science news: https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8.
Doesn't sound promising. It sounds like 5 people decided this wasn't truly groundbreaking and then a 6th person went rogue and decided it was - a few months later even.
Worth noting from the video, that 6th person also lost/left a job as a CEO recently and was no longer with their respective university. To me, this has all the hallmarks of a person who might be having some kind of mental episode and went all "free energy" on us. Purely speculation and I hope to God I'm wrong.
Edit: okay, looks like the whole research team agrees that this is a superconductor but everyone outside the team is remaining cautiously optimistic, if not downright doubtful. Time will tell but I'm very anxious to find out more.
First a small correction: there are actually seven people involved. The third author from the first paper (Young-Wan Kwon) was omitted from the second paper (which included four other authors).
That said, my impression is actually the opposite of yours. Both the first and second paper flatly state that this material is a room temperature superconductor, so unless the second paper represents a different subset of rogue authors, it appears that all of the authors agree that this material is groundbreaking (whether they're correct remains to be seen). Presumably the group would've preferred to tidy up their work before publishing; Kwon going rogue forced them to submit their work prematurely.
The dispute over authorship is just politics. My understanding is that the group intended to include Kwon as a co-author, but from context, I would assume that he was not offered to be listed within the first three spots. Since the Nobel Prize can only be split three ways at most, this would make him unlikely to share in the award.
Edit: Just to be clear, by "first paper" I'm referring to the three-author paper published on July 22, 2023. They write
By "second paper", I'm referring to the six-author paper released a few hours later. They write
So both papers clearly claim that this is a room temperature superconductor (again, they may be wrong). However, this leaves open the question of why there are two papers with different sets of authors. A dispute over authorship seems like the obvious explanation.
Hmmm, I didn't get that impression but I hope you're right.
I guess my question is this: if the paper was originally published in April, why is this just now making headlines? It sure sounds to me like a far more underwhelming paper was published in April and the scientific community didn't really take notice. I have a really hard time believing that a discovery as big as this could possibly sit unnoticed for several months in the depths of a Korean academic journal.
I don't know, there are an awful lot of red flags here. I seriously hope this is all just a debate over authorship because this would obviously change the world. I'm pretty doubtful though.
Edit: I'll add this to my comment. Seems at least one person failed to reproduce it.
Edit 2: Upon looking at the space battles link in the original post, it looks like several credible sources have failed to reproduce it. They keep creating diamagnetic materials. Cool but not a superconductor. Really hope it's just a matter of sample purity.
It's not uncommon to publish relatively underwhelming intermediary results while working on something more exciting (publish or perish, as they say). I'm reminded of when Fermilab announced their measurement of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment, which showed a greater than 4 sigma discrepancy between the theory prediction and experimental measurement. This was a highly anticipated announcement for the physics community -- it pointed towards new physics!
The very same day, Nature published BMW's lattice QCD calculation of the most troublesome piece of the theory estimate, which reduced the tension in the experimental and theoretical results to only a couple sigma.
Although BMW's preprint had been sitting on the arxiv for more than a year (albeit with more modest results), they waited to publish their full results until after Fermilab announced the new measurement, thus maximizing BMW's impact.
Actually, I think we might be talking about different papers. See my edit.
I think we might be talking about the same papers but I misunderstood the situation. To be fair, and this is my mistake, I was regurgitating second-hand reads of the paper. I was under the impression that the paper was in Korean and I didn't even bother trying to read it for that reason. Apologies if I misunderstood.
Oh no, you're correct -- there is another paper in Korean from April 2023 that preempts these two. That's why I suspected we were talking about different papers.
I hadn't looked at it earlier (I also can't read Korean), but now that I've pulled it up, I see that some of it is in English. From the abstract:
So yeah, it seems like they've been claiming this material is a room-temperature superconductor for months at least. I don't know why they would publish in such an obscure journal. It definitely makes them seem less credible.
I recommend the video. Sabine seems excellent at what she does.
A lab has reproduced room temperature
superconductivitydiamagnetism in LK-99Figure 2 seems to be the most important figure in the paper, as the discontinuity in the graph implies a phase transition from the normal to superconducting state.
They also attached two supplementary videos:
One video purporting to show the Meissner effect. (I think this video had already leaked online.)
Another video demonstrating a lack of ferromagnetism.
Unfortunately, the paper doesn't attempt to measure the resistivity of the sample.
I'm wildly skeptical of this. Don't get me wrong, It'd be fantastic. The problem is how far ahead of the curve this discovery would be. If you plot "humanity's warmest achieved superconductor" vs time, you'd see that we've raised the temperature slowly over the last decades, but are still miles off room temperature or even 0C.
EEVBlog also doesn't like their demo video. https://youtu.be/QHPFphlzwdQ
Discovery does not follow a pre-defined curve for inventions necesarilly. In many cases (and most important ones) nothing seems to happen until something happens (think penicillin).
This link says a paper from another institute concluded its just diamagnetic, not superconducting.
Yeah, I've read of a couple more negative replications. At this point it looks almost definitive. Disappointing :/
More likely in my opinion that the original team had a more involved process than the paper lets on, which makes sense because it was rushed out by one person.
Until we hear some firm statement from where the original source came from giving concrete answers. They might admit that they were wrong (or worse, lying) or they might reveal the actual synthesized material in its superconductive form. Until one of these happens, I wouldn't really give credence to replication attempts, as we have no idea how the original sample compares.
Evidently there exists another video of LK-99 exhibiting diamagnetism, provided directly to the New York Times by one of the authors (Hyun-Tak Kim, the third author of the second paper). Check out the video at the top of the article. The rest of the article is a good summary of the current state of affairs, but if you're following this thread, you're probably familiar with most of it already.
DAE follow the story about the university of rochester researcher who recently made retractions over similar claims?
Even if LK99 is the real thing (which is a big if), it won't change the world immediately or anything. For two reasons:
It reportedly has a low critical current which means even if superconducting, we can't transmit much current through it. Cooled superconductors used in technology today (MRIs for example) need large currents to produce the required magnetic fields they need to function.
LK99 is a class of materials which are ceramic-like and brittle. This means you can't really make wires out of them, nor will they be shock resistant, so cracking is your ultimate enemy is both manufacturing as well as any application which isn't permanently stationary and prone to bumps.
However, both of these can be addressed for all use cases, especially (2).
So, yours is a long post and I will try to reply to as much as I can.
AFAIK SCs are Newtonian systems, it's just that their atomic interactions do not cause as high an energy loss (almost non-existent loss). This means that eletrical energy can be stored in them forever.
If this is validated, there is no catch. Life will never be the same. See the OP for the nitter thread of results. However, we have had such moments before (fire, wheels, penicillin, transistors etc.).
Makes sense. For us that we follow closely, it's a lovely hobby :)