Superconductor Breakthrough Findings Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing - Tom's Hardware
3 years ago by CanadianCorhen to c/technology
The fact that this has been replicated is amazing!
wikipedia has a nice little table on all ongoing research as well.
Heres my analysis of what all has actually happened from a similar post with this article yesterday
From reading through the article and it's sources, here's what seems to be the case:
a simulation at Berkely National Labs with their supercomputing capabilities has verified that LK-99 theoretically has superconducting properties
Argonne National Labs also seems to be involved and doing stuff, but nothing official from them yet, besides maybe helping with simulation stuff
a Russian scientist is working on improving the synthesis process and has made some low purity samples that produce the Messnier effect, but higher purity than the original I think. It's all from Twitter (x) threads and a little hard to follow. Her handle is @iris_IGB
China National Lab (Shenyang) first principles analysis suggest gold and silver doping LK-99 will make superconductors as well. [Directly copied from article]
Under the guidance of Professor Chang Haixin, postdoctoral Wu Hao and doctoral student Yang Li of the School of Materials Science and Technology of Huazhong University of Science and Technology they have successfully verified and synthesized the LK-99 crystal. It can be magnetically levitated for the first time and this is shown on a bilibili video. They expect to realize the true sense of non-contact superconducting magnetic levitation. [Also Directly copied from article]
Direct source for last 2 points and also more info in general
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
I would give LK-99 a 95 percent chance of either being a true rook temperature superconductor or directly leading to the discovery of a true rook temp superconductor in the next few years.
A few caveats however: according to the simulation, the conductive pathways only forms when the copper bonds to a specific higher-energy spot in the crystal, so getting higher purities will likely need a fair amount of innovation on the production process. There are some other complications with the synthesis, so even if it is fully and properly confirmed with more papers and such it will still likely be a while before it can start to be used effectively.
yea, even if LK-99 is a room temp super conductor, i dont it expect to be THE room temp super conductor... but it will prove its possible, and provide pathways to improve it (either advancing LK-99, or showing how altering a material to introduce internal strain can cause it in other compounds)
The proof of concept alone will get so much money this way, i'm betting that we'll have either 3, 7, or 358 promising compounds or materials in a year or 3! Im getting cautiously optimistic here :-)
The fact that it was a Chinese team that made the discovery may be the kickstart an 'arms race' needs in order for the US to put significant resources behind the development of RTSCs. It's hard to pour millions of dollars into a hole if you want see the bottom of it. If there's a viable path and it looks like China may beat the US to the finish line, the US will throw more resources at the problem.
What argonne ends up saying will have huge weight for me. Hope to hear them chime in.
Even more interesting is Iris Alexander's claim that she was able to produce the material using relatively simple tools. Making superconductor materials could become a cottage industry.
I'm very skeptical, we have seen so many claims of room temperature superconductivity that have turned out to be fake... but considering that Berkeley National Laboratory replicated it, this makes me far more hopeful.
LBNL did not replicate, they simulated the material and found it promising. The lattice of the materials need some sort of substitution to happen in an less likely way, someone with knowledge will have to summarize better.
We're talking about Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory doing the simulation here. That is not a small research facility.
Seems to be exactly the opposite of what you describe. Actual experiment shows promise, then large lab runs simulation.
But welcome, indeed.
A practical superconductor is a huge deal, it would drastically change the way we deal with electrical power distribution and electromechanical applications. So any development is going to be big news. Though we're not talking about an actual working conductor, it's just excitement over research advancement, yeah? I've seen this kind of "big news" before in other tech sectors and time often proves it unworthy. If it does present a big step toward a practical superconductor that's great, but I wouldn't count any eggs yet.
I would say this is likely not a practical super conductor... But it may well be the first ever room temperature super conductor.
The first semi-conductors were not practical either, but we can all see where that led!
but we can all see where that led!
It led to the LED!
I would say this is likely not a practical super conductor… But it may well be the first ever room temperature super conductor.
Yes of course it would be a big deal if they create one to begin with. However if it's difficult and expensive to produce, that's not much help. It has to be mass producible and inexpensive to have industrial significance. I mean we already have expensive solutions. Don't need any more of those.
The first semi-conductors were not practical either, but we can all see where that led!
I don't know that semiconductors are a good parallel. Growing the crystals dates back to the early 1900s and was never an expensive or technologically difficult process. Doping silicon to create devices like diodes and transistors was something new, but was not exceedingly expensive or a great technological challenge. The migration to chips which require lithographic doping was more of a challenge.
In any case semiconductor devices were practical shortly after development. One of the first consumer products that used them was the "transistor radio" which was inexpensive and came out shortly after invention of the technology.
The benefits of a room temp super conductor mean that it would be produced at scale for price points well above standard. It's that big a deal in performance improvement.
The paper's method is fairly messy, low yield, and brand new... But it's also not that complex of metallurgy afaik. I would not be surprised to see iterations on method that scale well.
Regardless: if it's true then it proves it's possible... Which wasn't guaranteed until now.
Where were you, the day that everything changed? This is likely it, folks. If this pans out, it'll be jetpacks and mimosas on the Moon, Jetsons' style. Holy shit. We thought the computer age was something, this is going to be Something Else
Where was I? On the toilet.
I have been doing some thinking and this is game changing but not so much. We won't get hoverboards or flying cars to my knowledge. We will get much cheaper maglev trains, but in America we refuse to build public infrastructure that isn't for cars so that isn't gonna fix it.
We won't get faster traditional computers because those need semi-conductors. There are some patents and theories about superconducting transistors so we may get a "cool running" cpu eventually, but it won't be faster it just won't heat up.
Quantum computers will get cheaper and maybe more available, but they are still a research topic so we are probably decades away from them having practical use (or ever in terms of practical for everyday use, they will break encryption as we know it though).
We will "instantly" save something like 30% of our power generation that is lost to heat, but again that is going to require a massive infrastructure project to replace all high voltage power lines, so that is never going to happen in America.
Brush less motors will be able to be smaller and/or able to take in more energy so they will be more efficient, but we are still beholden to our energy storage density.
There is a theoretical idea of using superconducting rings to let electrons flow around it indefinitely, as an energy storage medium, but I have no idea how close that could be or how dense that would be compared to Lithium Ion batteries, or Fossil fuels which is the real competition.
We will get smaller and cheaper MRI's so medical imaging should get cheaper and more available to the "global south".
Am I missing anything?
More heat efficient processors and more energy efficient processors are one and the same. Which is huge. Energy usage is a large portion of the cost of computational infrastructure, and things like training neural networks. I suspect a thermally more efficient processor would also potentially last much longer too, with less intense thermal cycling.
A lot of data centers are limited by the energy infrastructure where they are constructed.
Superconductors can be used as very fast charging energy storage devices. Think a capacitor but with better energy storage than a battery. We could have electric cars that charge as fast as it takes to fill a gas tank and instantly charging electronic devices.
Do we have any theories on the density? Do they "just" fill up faster? Or can they be denser? We have lots of cool tech now that is limited imo by the fact that Gasoline is just so damn dense and our best batteries don't come close.
Gasoline is at 47.5 MJ/kg ^fn1 and LiOn is at 0.36-0.954 Mj/kg^fn2
Looks like as of 2016 a theorized coil superconducting battery has about 2 Mj/m^3^ while Gasoline is 30 Gj/m^3^^fn1
:(
Eager to see what other novel ways we can use this material though. If it is cheap and easy to make surely new ideas will be flowing fast.
I thought heat is the main thing limiting computer performance? Like, if we had superconducting transistors that take little energy to change state, highly parallel tasks that are power-limited today would get a whole lot faster. Think native 4k path tracing-level graphics in games on our phones. And better/faster/cheaper AI systems, though they are limited more by memory than by compute, so they'd likely still be run in the cloud mostly.
Heat is a big issue, but we are close to the physical limits of transistor size, they are nearly the size of atoms AFAIK. So this will allow us to have more of them closer I guess with no heat limits. There is also a lot of stuff that goes above my head about quantum tunneling when our transistors get that size. But transistors use semiconductors (Sillicon) not conductors, so this isn't a drop in replacement. Will require a new type of transistor that uses a conductor I suppose.
Maybe, there's still important questions. Will it scale? Preliminary tests only transfered mA's before the super conductivity breaks down. So can you layer the material to get higher amps? Will cables have to be made in one continuous part or will the super conductivity work across joined cables
I feel like I've seen enough to say that this is likely real and you are probably correct. I'm struggling to figure out how to prepare for this though. Are there companies or industries that we should be investing in or something?
This seems promising, I can't wait for my guy to eat his shorts.
Hitch your tits and pucker up. We’re entering a new age of industry. Much like the original Industrial Revolution, technology is going to advance at an extremely rapid pace. Fusion, quantum computing supremacy. Just… wow. How far off is general AI with this new room temperature superconductor?
And Fusion is pretty close to begin with. Commonwealth Fusion is well within their purpose time table so far. They don't need any new superconductors for their project.
It's not that it's not intelligent, it's that predictive language models are obviously just one piece of the puzzle, and we're going to need all the pieces to get to AGI. It's looking incredibly doable if we figured out how to make something that's dumb but sounds smarter than most of us already. We just need to connect it to other models that handle other things better.
Really appreciate the write up! I didn't know the computing power required!
Another stupid question (if you don't mind) - adding superconductors to GPUs doesn't really se like it would make a huge difference on the heat generation. Sure, some of the heat generated is through trace resistance, but the overwhelming majority is the switching losses of the transistors which will not be effected by superconductor technology. Are we assuming these superconductors will be able to replace semiconductors too? Where are these CPU/GPU efficiencies coming from?
Simply throwing computing power at the existing models won't get us general AI. It will let us develop bigger and more complex models, but there's no guarantee that'll get us closer to the real thing.
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If you want to see all the conflicting findings and by-the-minute updates, this post is great: https://forums.spacebattles.com/...
I'm very much not an expert, but my read of this is: most replication efforts have mostly failed when it comes to making a working room temp superconductor (meaning conducts electricity with no resistance). However, groups are increasingly seeing some of the other characteristics expected from superconductors, and it appears that the failures might just be caused by using an unrefined technique.
So time will tell, but this is probably a big advance, but not itself a world changer just yet.
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