Anschel

queer quaker commie cat

In addition to the blurb above, I'm a recovering mathematician, Jewish, and autistic as fuck--those didn't alliterate

Sometimes I write poems, mostly in English and Spanish

I feel weird putting my age in my bio but I am in fact a Grown Up if you were worried

רעד מיט מיר ייִדיש

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email
anschelsc@gmail.com

vogon
@vogon
  • a team in china has succeeded in growing a crystal of LK-99 and levitating it in a magnetic field
  • two independent teams did first-principles theoretical analyses of LK-99 and found that it might indeed be a superconductor, but with caveats: the electronic properties which suggest superconductivity depend on substituting a copper atom in one particular site in the crystal and it's the less energetically-favorable one of the two, and bulk superconductivity might depend on growing a monocrystalline sample
  • half a dozen other experimenters have tried and failed to reproduce the original findings, which seems consistent with the theoretical findings that it might be superconducting but only if you're really lucky1

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


  1. figuring out how to get luckier will be the work of materials engineers



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in reply to @vogon's post:

thanks for this summary, my social horizon has been a real mix of "this is nothing, don't get your hopes up" and cautious optimism.

i don't know a lot about this domain but it seems like the real question is how mass-produceable this stuff is, right? like if an entire power grid made of it experiences no waste, that's still a massive infrastructural undertaking to take advantage of it. but hey maybe that would finally be the kick in the pants the US needs to get excited about (/ rediscovering its ability for) infra... i dunno.

yeah, if it does need this energetically unfavorable doping to be a superconductor there'll be work involved in dialing in the process to where crystals are reliably doped properly -- plus the... uh, crumbliness of the base material, and the prospect that the material needs to be monocrystalline to superconduct, makes it seem like it might be impractical to draw it out into a wire for a while if ever.

also, superconductors have a critical current above which they stop superconducting, and the original paper showed a critical current on their sample of 300mA on a sample which was prepared in a 5mm-diameter tube -- so even if it can be made in bulk, it also might not be able to carry a huge amount of current.

at the very least though, it might be an interesting new field of research that leads to a practical material in coming years.

yeah, absolutely

on its own, reading about the suspicion from the first-principles papers that it might only be a good superconductor if you can grow a monocrystalline sample was enough to instill a combination of relief like "oh! that explains why nobody was able to replicate it the first try" and frustration like "aw that means it's gonna be years of material engineering before this is useful for anything outside the lab"

oh yeah, absolutely -- the "99" in LK-99 supposedly stands for the year they first synthesized it, and 24 years of work from first synthesis to "we managed to get enough to characterize the electrical properties of the sample and write a janky paper about it" sounds about right

I'm wondering if it having to be super lucky to get it in the right config will still make MRI machines and other specialist devices like it a more likely outcome than say replacing the entire grid. Though I can see the US delaying infrastructure more than they already have and use the production of the LK-99 material as an excuse.

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