Why is the recent news around the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor such a big deal? What material impact would those findings have on electronics and modern technology?
Some great answers, but none of them ELI5, so I’ll have a go.
When electricity passes through a non-metal, it’s like trying to push a person through a wall, the person just bounces off. When electricity passes through a metal, it’s like you put lots and lots of doors in the wall, so the people (electricity) can pass through it easily. Different metals have different conductivity (more or less doors).
Superconductivity is like taking the wall away completely, 100% of the people can freely pass the threshold. But, so far, we’ve only been able to make superconductors that work at very, very, very low temperatures; or very, very, very high pressures. Of course, it’s not viable for our computer or electric cables to be cooled that much, or pressured that much.
In our modern world, with so many devices running on electricity, we lose lots and lots of energy & money to resistance (those pesky walls with not enough doors). If we had a superconductive material that works at room temperature, and normal pressure, it would mean we can send electricity around the world with very small amounts lost to resistance; it would mean our devices would become incredibly efficient; and likely lead to the development of incredible new technology.
I’d like to add to your excellent ELI5 explanation that removing the walls also means that super conductors don’t generate heat. Normally those people would bounce off the walls and all that bouncing makes the room warmer. They’re also wasted energy - you pump those people into the system, but all they do is make things warmer with their stupid bouncing. Since lots of electrical components will melt if the temperature gets too high, this also means you have to either waste power on cooling equipment to keep things cool, or limit how much power you pump into the system to ensure the rooms don’t get too hot.
This heat generation is putting some hard caps on current hardware designs and speeds especially for computer components.But if you could build computer components with superconducting circuitry, it would firstly use a lot less power, and secondly you could make it go much faster without risking cooking the components. So for personal devices and PCs, this would have huge potential.
but all they do is make things warmer with their stupid bouncing
Stupid bouncing people! Thanks for expanding on my comment. I hope they explain this potential discovery for those who don’t understand it.
most of heat generated in CMOS like in every digital chip since 80s comes from transient shorting of source voltage during switching between states. you can’t help that with superconductors. You can decrease heat load by either lowering voltage (bad for stability below some point), lowering frequency (your phone/pc already does this when needed) or making the transistors smaller (hard but worthwhile) and improving chip design in general
A working room-temperature superconductor would have many, many applications.
Just for example:
Superconductors are currently used in MRI machines for medical imaging. They require cooling to extremely low temperatures. Today’s MRI machines consume liquid helium to keep the superconducting components cold enough to function. A room-temperature superconductor would make MRI imaging vastly cheaper and more sustainable. (Helium is a limited resource; the planet ain’t making any more of it.) It could even be cheap enough to replace medical X-rays.
Superconducting coils could be used in power systems, including generators and power storage systems, to increase their efficiency well above what can be done with today’s copper coils.
It’s less likely, but superconducting wires could be used in electronics of all sorts to reduce energy consumption, improve features like wireless charging, etc.
My attempt: ambiant temperature superconductor would be like when we went from lamps to semi-conductor. We were doing many things already with lamps, but semi-conductor allowed for incredible miniaturisation and efficiency. They allowed the invention of computers, Internet and smartphones.
We already do many things with magnetic fields, but ambiant temperature superconductor would be a big technologic jump.
Many things would rapidly become much more efficient, but we have no idea yet of the full potential of this technology. It could be helpful for quantum technologies and fusion reactors for example.
Superconductors can transmit energy with no loss. However current superconductors require very low temps.
Room temp superconductors would open the door to much more efficient transmission of electricity in everything from the electric grid to your home computer.
Now whether the LK-99 can be replicated reliably, verified to be superconducting and what the properties of LK-99 would be at scale would dictate how it could be used (is it malleable? does it wear? are there things that cause it to lose its superconductive properties?).
For example, you can resolve a lot of blockers of scaling quantum computers based on superconductive qubits.
My 5 year old appreciates this very clear answer.
Well obviously
Quantum computing needs to be cold to avoid thermal noise from destroying coherence. A room temperature superconductor probably doesn’t enable room temperature quantum computing.
I think that if you can scale your physical qubits easily you will be able to use all the power of error correction codes. Even a thousand of physical qubits per one logical qubit should be feasible if you do not need to support superconductivity by helium coolers.
Error correction relies on the majority of values to remain unchanged. I don’t think that assumption holds for qubits at room temperature. I’ll admit that I’m not well read enough to be certain.
Room temperature superconductors would be great for a lot of applications, but I don’t think they do that much to enable quantum computing.
Afaik superconducting quantum computers are operated well below the critical temperature for copper. They wouldn’t go through that extra effort if it wasn’t necessary.
But it might help in general right? Less resistance means less thermal noise?
At the temps needed, regular copper is superconducting.
It could be helpful in some of the intermediary stages to reduce heat production, but it’s not going to be a major linchpin for quantum computing. They’ll still need cryostats and liquid helium cooling.
It"s a big deal because hoverboards and hovering cars like in the movies
Bear in mind the paper(s) has not been peer reviewed, and nobody has replicated the material, and the video they released is not very convincing. A room temperature superconductor would be huge news, if they actually created one.
If it’s not peer reviewed then why tf are we talking about it like it’s true? The whole point of peer review is to avoid this bullshit buzz that the news thrives on.
I have no idea, that’s why I made my comment lol.
I think it’s also very interesting from a ‘pure science’ background. Superconductivity isn’t ‘perfect conductivity’ - it isn’t that we’ve found ways of making normal resistance less and less until eventually we made it to zero. Instead, there’s certain materials that, as the temperature falls / pressure rises, that all of a sudden the resistance just disappears completely. The electrons pair up in a different way from usual, and we see different properties, like completely ejecting all magnetic fields.
They tend to have a ‘breakdown current’ above which they stop superconducting, so it’s not like they’re the instant answer to all of our power distribution woes. They could help in places, but they also tend to be amazingly expensive to manufacture, so they’re no magic bullet. Their magnetic properties might enable us to make things like rotating hard disks with truly absurd storage capacities - you wouldn’t need much superconducting material for each one.
We’ve had superconductors that operate at liquid-nitrogen temperatures for quite a while, which makes them easy enough to study in a laboratory. Having room-temperature ones makes it even easier, and might let us understand them even better. This one sounds a bit impractical for wide-scale use (it’s a powder) but might let us develop more useful ones.
Biggest one’s I’ve seen pointed out are how it can affect quantum computing technology and how it might help us make nuclear fusion more attainable.
Quantum computing can be broken down by it’s words. Quantum being a state that fluctuates, meaning it’s not always one thing or another. Computing, well it’s computing. Quantum computers then would be computers utilizing quantum mechanics in a way that I understand it as, if things are currently ran where a number can be one or zero, it could now be one AND zero at the same time. Currently this takes massive amounts of cooling as a computer chip trying to skirt the laws of physics probably runs a little extra hot. This tech could allow for massively reduced heat production once someone figures out how to factor it into the design of the parts that normally get hot. You gotta be a smart 5 year old to get it but that’s my best attempt.
For nuclear fusion, the chemical reaction that occurs generates so much heat that, to contain the reaction to a size we can manage, we use more energy keeping it cooled and contained and going than we gain from harnessing it. If we can reduce the energy needed to keep it going, we could potentially have a less volatile and more sustainable source of energy that we’ve dreamed about as a species since we figured out what the stars really were.
