Researchers claim to achieve room temperature/ambient pressure superconductivity

[UNCjigga]

Didn’t see this posted—thought this would be front page news as—IF TRUE—this could be the biggest achievement since…the transistor?
—
South Korean scientists have announced the development of a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.

“All evidence and explanation lead that LK-99 is the first room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor. The LK-99 has many possibilities for various applications such as magnet, motor, cable, levitation train, power cable, qubit for a quantum computer, THz Antennas, etc. We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,”

Article: https://www.iflscience.com/first-ro...uperconductor-achieved-claim-scientists-70001

Straight to the abstract source for the engineers here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

I’m no expert—but they claim to have invented a new material based on modified lead-apatite they are calling LK-99. What’s crazy is that the material and method they used is readily available and replicable in just about any competent research university, so we should know soon enough if it’s real or shens.

Now we wait for lab replication and peer review. Don’t go corner the market in lead just yet.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Very cool if reproducible and scalable.

 

[cytg111]

Please god yes. But probably not.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

From my understanding, the paper is shit but the researchers are legit, so cautiously optimistic that at least some intriguing science comes out of it. If it's all legit then yeah, good times ahead.

 

[balloonshark]

Should I buy stock in Mattel?

 

[pmv]

I hope it's a false alarm - I can't afford to upgrade my graphics card and CPU yet again.

 

[sdifox]

I thought this was more a impossibility rather than a challenging problem?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I thought this was more a impossibility rather than a challenging problem?

Many scientific endeavors are impossible until they are successful.

 

[sdifox]

To go from -135C to +136C is a bit hard to swallow

 

[nickqt]

Until it's reproduced by multiple labs, I think of it the same way as cold fusion and alien contact with earth.

 

[cytg111]

Until it's reproduced by multiple labs, I think of it the same way as cold fusion and alien contact with earth.

This.

 

[Stokely]

I'll get excited when it's reproduceable and published in some peer-reviewed paper or however that works.

There's tons of experiments that claim miraculous things happening all the time. They are fishing for money is my understanding. Then you never hear about them again. On arstechnica (a sciency forum) you'll get some loon coming on there who thinks inevitably that there was a conspiracy to hush up the miracle product. Occam's razor says there just wasn't much there to begin with, you don't need a shadowy conspiracy to explain why the "miracle" was never heard from again.

Sure it's fine to hope that something like this is real, but I wouldn't get excited until it shows its something more than a funding ploy. More power to the real scientists!

 

[KMFJD]

This stuff is way beyond me but the implications would be huge if true


https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16892.pdf

Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-substituted lead phosphate apatite.

Sinéad M. Griffin1,2

1Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA and
2Molecular Foundry Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA
(Dated: August 1, 2023)

A recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (‘LK99’) has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite.


Here's the latest, a team in China has supposedly replicated this now

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

~two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other is from Sinéad Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor.

 

[Ken g6]

Until it's reproduced by multiple labs, I think of it the same way as cold fusion and alien contact with earth.

I like the quote from the Science blog post @KMFJD posted:

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory.

As for the other, it does occur to me that this formulation feels like it could have fallen fully-formed out of the sky.

 

[UNCjigga]

Forget hoverboards--give me zero point energy self-levitating cars.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Forget hoverboards--give me zero point energy self-levitating cars.

Zero Point energy is another technology that Superconductivity is but one step.
Give me a GPU that doesn't do a good impression of a space heater.

That is what superconductivity really means, a massive reduction of heat waste in electronics, which in turn means massive reduction of energy requirements.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Zero Point energy is another technology that Superconductivity is but one step.
Give me a GPU that doesn't do a good impression of a space heater.

That is what superconductivity really means, a massive reduction of heat waste in electronics, which in turn means massive reduction of energy requirements.

What about the gravity gun from HL2 though?

 

[Vic]

Many scientific endeavors are impossible until they are successful.

Some things are genuinely impossible. Such as FTL/warp drive, time travel, teleportation, and electrons overcoming their self-repulsive effect at STP.

 

[Ken g6]

What about the gravity gun from HL2 though?

No. Probably. But there are plenty of real-world levitation methods not involving gravity.

Some things are genuinely impossible. Such as warp drive, time travel,

Probably correct. They require matter with negative mass or similar.

teleportation

Depends on your definition and scale.

and electrons overcoming their self-repulsive effect at STP.

We'll see...

 

[Meghan54]

Some things are genuinely impossible. Such as FTL/warp drive, time travel, teleportation, and electrons overcoming their self-repulsive effect at STP.

A Warp Drive Breakthrough That Could Make Interstellar Travel Possible — Popular Mechanics

Scientists now know how we can travel faster than the speed of light. Steering at warp speed? Not quite yet. IN LATE 2020, physicist Harold “Sonny” White, PhD, research director of the nonprofit Limitless Space Institute, noticed something peculiar—and familiar—in a circular pattern of data...

apple.news

Just a thought…

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

FTL/warp

Albecurrie drive says hello.

 

[Vic]

Albecurrie drive says hello.

Requires negative mass which does not exist in our universe.

 

[Vic]

A Warp Drive Breakthrough That Could Make Interstellar Travel Possible — Popular Mechanics

Scientists now know how we can travel faster than the speed of light. Steering at warp speed? Not quite yet. IN LATE 2020, physicist Harold “Sonny” White, PhD, research director of the nonprofit Limitless Space Institute, noticed something peculiar—and familiar—in a circular pattern of data...

apple.news

Just a thought…

I'm a droid fanboi so I can't do Apple, news or otherwise.

But the primary issue with FTL is that it violates causality. Because the speed of light is not actually the speed of light, it is the rate at which causes can perpetuate effects. It is the speed of causality. And our universe, being very much self-correcting, has ensured that this cannot happen by making it so that any amount of energy required to violate causality exceeds the total amount of energy of energy available.

 

[pmv]

Some things are genuinely impossible. Such as FTL/warp drive, time travel, teleportation, and electrons overcoming their self-repulsive effect at STP.

And a perpetual-motion machine.

I gather there are some theoretical possibilities for FTL travel (or a warp drive), but they have minor technical drawbacks like requiring more energy than exists in the universe, little things like that. Edit - ah, that's more-or-less what @Vic said.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Requires negative mass which does not exist in our universe.

Which does not exist so far. Have some confidence in our ingenuity!