The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor has been found

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, tim0901 said:

No, they really aren't - that's not what a phase of matter is. Phases of matter are solid, liquid, gas etc. and graphite/diamond are clearly both solids. What they are is different allotropes - different arrangements of the atoms while in the same phase of matter.

 

If you want to be unnecessarily pedantic and call them allotropes, because they are different configurations of the same atom in the same state, fine.

Generally speaking any area appearing in a phase diagram is a phase (guess why it's called a phase diagram?).

 

But if you want to be pedantic you should also be correct, solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma are not "phases" but states. Moving from one to the other is always a phase change, but you can have a phase change within the same state.

[tikker]

Pretty cool if true. I hope to see the peer reviewed version soon. It's always a bit strange to me to see something on the arXiv that is not even submitted yet. Unless their intention is to quickly get more people to try and work on it of course.

[Doobeedoo]

Cool. Now wheo knows when these discovery things will even get released for products let alone consumer. On top of that, manufacturers are even slow adopting even basic stuff or making better standards.

[Isuck Assimov]

man i read so much about magnets today and am reminded that talking about conductivity and magnetism on an atomic level is make my brain hurt

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

24 minutes ago, tikker said:

It's always a bit strange to me to see something on the arXiv that is not even submitted yet. Unless their intention is to quickly get more people to try and work on it of course.

As long as it's not another palladium cold fusion fool's gold rush that distract from proper research, its fine.

[StDragon]

39 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

As long as it's not another palladium cold fusion fool's gold rush that distract from proper research, its fine.

That was my thought too, another Pons-Fleischmann moment.

 

Until there's independent testing, it's still BS and vaporware.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

Certainly fascinating, and if it can be repeated and the properties are right this could be game changing. Pretty sure for most applications the lead content won't be an issue, at least not a big enough one to prevent widespread adoption. For things like magnets we will need to see what the critical field and current densities are and whether the conductivity is isotropic etc.

 

Given how long it has been until high-temperature superconductors really started to show up in applications, I don't see this becoming usable tech any time soon. Plus from what I have read the response from the scientific community is highly skeptical.

[CarlBar]

7 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

Certainly fascinating, and if it can be repeated and the properties are right this could be game changing. Pretty sure for most applications the lead content won't be an issue, at least not a big enough one to prevent widespread adoption. For things like magnets we will need to see what the critical field and current densities are and whether the conductivity is isotropic etc.

 

Given how long it has been until high-temperature superconductors really started to show up in applications, I don't see this becoming usable tech any time soon. Plus from what I have read the response from the scientific community is highly skeptical.

 

The reported current densities at room temperature are fairly poor apparently. And yes lots of scepticism out there, been too many falsified papers of this nature over the years.

 

That said the main reason high temperature superconductors have been slow to get into commercial applications is mainly how much of a massive pain they are  to manufacture, this seems oddly simple, if it holds for longer runs or w/e it would be vastly easier to implement at scale in a commercial environment than existing high temperature superconductors. 

[Aluminumhaste]

All of this screams "too good to be true".

[CarlBar]

12 minutes ago, Aluminumhaste said:

All of this screams "too good to be true".

 

I largely agree, though apparently there's video of them doing the "floating above a magnet" thing with a sample of it, looks like it might be trickier to make on scale now i've seen that as it's clearly not superconductive throughout as one corner is touching the magnet, but the rest is levitating and there's no sign of cold air coming off the sample. Could still be faked any number of ways, but it's better than what the previous fakes have shown off AFAIK. But there's also some doubts about some of their data sets.

 

TLDR, messy.

 

Video link: https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n

[bcredeur97]

what are some examples of things people have done or thought of that would require superconductivity at normal temps? 

Just trying to actually realize what this can be used for if it's real lol

[StDragon]

12 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

looks like it might be trickier to make on scale now i've seen that as it's clearly not superconductive throughout as one corner is touching the magnet, but the rest is levitating and there's no sign of cold air coming off the sample.

The biggest red flag is them having so long to develop this, yet not a single deliverable to market.

 

You don't need perfect room temp Superconductivity to have viable utility. Even if it was a sub-optimal solution, the energy savings and reduction of existing cryogenic cooling would be immense. Such a product would instantly put money in the coffers to fund additional R&D.

[CarlBar]

21 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

what are some examples of things people have done or thought of that would require superconductivity at normal temps? 

Just trying to actually realize what this can be used for if it's real lol

 

Does it use electricity? Then it's an application. Superconductivity isn't just about weird stuff you can only do with superconductors. It's also about being a nearly zero resistance material. That dramatically raises the efficiency possibble. Typically somwhere between 8-15%, (depending on a lot of factors), of the power generated by the powerplants is lost before it reaches you, and even more once it starts being used in your home.

 

As a sort of rough example assume everything you own that uses electricity starts costing 25% less to run.

[CarlBar]

22 minutes ago, StDragon said:

The biggest red flag is them having so long to develop this, yet not a single deliverable to market.

 

You don't need perfect room temp Superconductivity to have viable utility. Even if it was a sub-optimal solution, the energy savings and reduction of existing cryogenic cooling would be immense. Such a product would instantly put money in the coffers to fund additional R&D.

 

I don't know much about the research group, but my impression is this is something they've just got to the point of going "we think we've got somthing, take a look". I believe they're an academic research group, not an industrial one, so advancing the science by discovering new things is the primary goal, not monetising what they find. Thats for someone else to do.

[bcredeur97]

8 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Does it use electricity? Then it's an application. Superconductivity isn't just about weird stuff you can only do with superconductors. It's also about being a nearly zero resistance material. That dramatically raises the efficiency possibble. Typically somwhere between 8-15%, (depending on a lot of factors), of the power generated by the powerplants is lost before it reaches you, and even more once it starts being used in your home.

 

As a sort of rough example assume everything you own that uses electricity starts costing 25% less to run.

Yeah sorry for the dumb question, but yeah... thats a huge deal! wow

[CarlBar]

50 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

Yeah sorry for the dumb question, but yeah... thats a huge deal! wow

 

Nah it's fine. Don't worry about it. :).

 

Also those same savings and maybe more would apply to any electrically run equipment in factories making the stuff you consume. For things where the electricity usage in manufacturing is the largest cost factor thats a major cheapening of your cost to buy. It's really hard to overstate just how big of a deal it would be for cost of living.

 

Then you get into freaky stuff you could do with it and it's a whole other ballgame.

[LAwLz]

I'll believe it when I see it.

It's not that uncommon for someone to think they have discovered a breakthrough, only to realize their measurements were wrong, or that they overlooked something. I really hope it is true, but I won't be holding my breath.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I'll believe it when I see it.

It's not that uncommon for someone to think they have discovered a breakthrough, only to realize their measurements were wrong, or that they overlooked something. I really hope it is true, but I won't be holding my breath.

 

Yeah, or for it to be super weird scaling things, or (especially in chemistry), low level contamination in either the working implements or the starting materials that result in it working a bit different than you thought, (and this assumes this paper isn't another YBCO example where the pre-print included a deliberate error in the procedure to make it impossible to replicate before they could do a full fancy presentation on it).

 

I think one of the comments i saw at "In the Pipeline" sums up my thoughts:

 

Quote

Well I'm betting against it being real.

This is on the XKCD basis that if it is real, I will be much too excited to care about having lost the bet.

 

[Stahlmann]

If fusion reactors are anything to go by we're probably looking at decades of reasearch before the first real produts using this technology will come out. And a few more decades before it hits consumer products. (If they can even find a use case for it that is)

[CarlBar]

8 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

If fusion reactors are anything to go by we're probably looking at decades of research before the first real products using this technology will come out. And a few more decades before it hits consumer products. (If they can even find a use case for it that is)

 

I allready went over the potentiol use cases a few posts up, (TLDR anything using electricity). The potentiol uses are just huge.

 

If true how long it takes is entirely a matter of how well the production process scales. Current commonly used superconductors are really finky to produce which makes them difficult to use en mass even in places where the liquid nitrogen cooling isn't an issue. But this may not have that issue, it's hard to tell. There are use cases where it's apparent low current carrying capacity would be an issue, (any super magnet for example), but it's not a deal breaker in a lot of applications AFAIK.

[Forbidden Wafer]

I pity the fool... 

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

9 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

If fusion reactors are anything to go by we're probably looking at decades of reasearch before the first real produts using this technology will come out. And a few more decades before it hits consumer products. (If they can even find a use case for it that is)

Oddly enough, fusion reactors could be one of the first use cases for this.

 

One of the limiting factors in fusion technology as I understand it is the plasma pressure, or more correctly the magnetic pressure that can be build up by the superconducting magnets. The higher this is, the smaller the chamber can be and thus the whole thing becomes smaller, more efficient etc. Hence why ITER is damn big, because they designed it with regular low-temperature superconductors in mind, which have limits on the magnetic field they can create.

 

High-temperature have much higher critical fields and current densities, and provided the trend would hold for a RT superconductor, then this material could be even better. Heck, even if you had to cool it to LN2 temps it would still be amazing, provided you can make friggin' wire out of it.

 

High-temperature superconductors are now making their first appearance in commercial products (if you can call high-end scientific equipment that), but it took a long time to figure out how to make them into "wires". The solution is to have super-thin, single crystals grown on metallic tape that is both flexible and still provides the required properties. However, this did not address the next question: how do you connect two of them? So there is still the need for something like superconducting solder, or very precise bonding techniques. But, these things have now been solved (more or less) so there's hope we could use this for the new material as well. Even better would be if you could just use it as a filler in regular wires instead though.

 

But they will definitely make an appearance in things like MRI machines, particle accelerators, and if they are cheap enough: power lines, motors, generators...

[CarlBar]

@GarlicDeliverySystem mentioned this a couple of times but at room temperature at least this stuff has been displaying fairly low peak current capabilities. That said this is also a very rough early sample, so if it is real there may be room for improvement with better fabrication..

 

But otherwise spot on.

 

Apparently someone on twitch is attempting to replicate the work, for whatever reason there's only the clips from the stream, not the video they were clipped from so i can't verify the claim as they're offline atm, but apparently they're at the slow 72 hour cook stage of things as of 18 hours ago when the clips where taken. Apply salt as i can't verify the claim that this person is trying to replicate this paper, (or that they're following the procedure properly), but will still link in case it's legit:

 

https://www.twitch.tv/andrewmccalip

[Beskamir]

I'm just going to dump this here:

Good luck making wires out of a ceramic!

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

2 hours ago, Beskamir said:

Good luck making wires out of a ceramic!

They have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_wire

https://www.fujikura.co.uk/products/fel2ghts_high-temperature-superconductors

https://www.bruker.com/zh/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors/ybco-2g-hts-superconductor.html

https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors.html

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fusion-2662267312

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359028607000344

 

The point stands though, having the material is one thing. Making a "wire" out of it and scaling up production are the difficult ones. As you can see from some of the links HTS wires/tapes are now becoming available on a commercial scale, but don't think it is a commodity. It just means someone is willing to make it for you, but the quantities are low and costs per meter are still incredible.

I remember reading somewhere that commonwealth fusion systems got into the supercon production business, simply because their estimated needs exceeded commercial world production capacity. Bruker is now offering supercon magnets with hybrid LTS/HTS coils, and I think other manufacturers of magnets/MRI machines might follow soon.