There is a novel material called LK-99 that was purported to be a superconductor at standard temperature/pressure, but it turns out it may not actually be a superconductor. If it were true, it would’ve been a revolutionary breakthrough.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99
It might still result in it.
Right now the process might result in a material that superconducts at room temperature, it might only have some qualities at some temperatures, or it might not have any at any temp.
There’s a lot in the process that’s just blind chance, eventually we might be able to influence that chance
Sounds to me like the chemistry equivalent of trying to hit household objects with a hammer to make tones until you find one or make one that can shatter a wine glass.
100 billion kWh of electricity are wasted on transmission losses each year in the US alone. That’s equivalent to 3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7. Superconductivity enables lossless electricity transmission at high voltages and currents.
Note: I might be confusing some of this with semiconductors, it’s been a while since I learned about them.
Superconductors are used in computing. Specifically, the property of a superconductor is that the material offers no electrical resistance, and it expels magnetic fields around them. That last part is known as the Meissner Effect.
The fundamentals of modern computers rely on electricity. When an electrical current is running, it creates an electromagnetic field around the circuit. This can affect other nearby circuits. Have you ever had a set of headphones that also picked up the microphone when it shouldn’t? This can be because two circuits are interfering with each other. This property also spurs innovation in transferring data, and shapes how we build things like ethernet cables to be resistant to outside interference.
Superconductors are appearing in the news because in some labs they’ve seen superconducting properties in materials that exist at room temperature. Before now, we’ve seen superconductors operating only at extremely low temperatures like 10K, aka 10C over absolute zero. That’s friggin’ chilly.
Quantum Computer Scientists use superconductors to make their computers run. It’s not really my field, but as I understand it you need to keep the computer very cold while it runs, and even then it won’t run for very long before heating up. My understanding of the state of the technology is that for this reason quantum computers are incredibly expensive and only last for a few seconds or minutes. A room temperature superconductor has the potential to change that.
Sometime in… I want to say the 1980’s, we reached a point where we couldn’t build computer processors that run faster than they do now. If we tried to make them run faster, they’d begin to heat up and melt. So we started working on making processors behave more efficiently. A potential use case for a superconductor would be in resuming the work on making processors run faster. If we can keep our existing methods of making more efficient processors and combine them with inherently faster technologies, it could mean big things in the world of computing.
We’ve only seen some preliminary results in labs, so I’m not sure people should be getting too over it yet. But it’s an exciting development in the world of circuitry.
From what I’ve heard (feel free to add to it or to correct me):
Our technology uses normal conductors. Computers, gaming consoles, smartphones etc are all limited in their performance by the power of the conductors. Super conductors existed already, however they require (near to) freezing temperature. That obviously makes it impossible to use those superconductors in normal daily technology.
If however we could have superconductors who can work at normal temperature and don’t require extreme cold, we could have superconductors that massively increase the efficiency of our technology (more efficient smartphone battery life, better electric cars etc)
Nothing. It was confirmed not to be a superconductor.
There’s been mixed results so far. The problem everyone is having is recreating the exact same material Lee and Kim did in their lab. Not only do they have to manage to add a copper atom in there, but it needs to be in the correct spot. That’s why we’re seeing different results everywhere as labs around the world are trying to recreate this material. We won’t know for sure until somebody can prove they created LK99.
