> "We remain certain that there has been no data fabrication, data manipulation or any other scientific misconduct
If your method can't be followed to reproduce the data, fabricated or not, you did not conduct your science properly.
Three scientists in South Korea claim they've crafted a superconductor that works at both room temperature and ambient pressure – a revolutionary breakthrough if confirmed. Superconductors – which are able to conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, and therefore have almost zero energy loss – typically require …
It doesn't look hard to replicate
That's the really good thing about the paper – it gives a simple recipe with easily sourced ingredients for making LK-99. As you say, this should be replicated within days by a number of labs. If it wasn't the long vacation(*), you could even get a hordes of undergrads trying it as lab work.
(*) No idea what other countries do, maybe it's already happening.
Other countries look out the window at the rain and sigh. Also, we have cold feet. It's cold
Even my ex-Romanian rescue dog is complaining about the cold and wet..
As for the two Spanish rescues - they look out the door at the falling rain, look at me then get back up on the sofa again.
The two ex-farm cats mock them for being soft.
"If your method can't be followed to reproduce the data, fabricated or not, you did not conduct your science properly."
Or, maybe, just didn't write it up properly so there's a missing step, or something. Benefit of the doubt until confirmed, IMV. The author should be able to clarify and/or help others to replicate who can then check if the process is actually correct. If he can't then yeah, bad science.
It's good that El Reg is taking a slightly skeptical view. Too many media outlets take what someone has said at face value and proclaim it is a breakthrough. Questioning data you provided isn't being a hater, pushing fake news or anything like that (despite what some politicians will tell you). It's required for good science.
I'd like to see some of these breakthroughs come true. I'd like to see Fusion become a thing (I don't think it will, but I hope I am wrong). I'd like to see room temperature super conductors, and experience any benefits they bring. I'd like to see a safe replacement for Lithium in batteries that offers the same or better capacity.
It's good to remain skeptical though, as long as you stay open minded. I try to do both.
Fusion is definitely a thing, and we already get a significant part of our electricity from it...in the form of solar power.
Pedantry aside, I'm pretty confident that humans will be able to create a fusion power plant that creates more energy than is put in. Whether that will be at a cost that will be commercially viable is a different question.
Technically, that has been achieved just a few weeks ago, and it made a lot of noise in scientific circles.
We're not talking about commercial production yet, though.
As for superconductivity, I certainly do hope that that will arrive. Just think, with that single innovation all power generators will instantly become up to 20% more efficient !
Not entirely sure about this, but as superconductors repel magnetic fields, and water is diamagnetic - repelled by a magnetic field, would a superconducting iron actually repel the water in wet clothes?
Videos of diamagnetism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u36QpPvEh2c Water at about 4m 11s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-FNdO4tb-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJsVqc0ywM. Frog levitation in a magnetic field
Register boffins, please advise.
OK it is nearly 5pm on a Friday, so have a nice weekend.
We could also get fusion power from non-solar sources tomorrow: just drop a hydrogen bomb down a deep hole, set it off and use it as you would geothermal power. The early trials showed that cooling took place more rapidly than expected but these trials were limited to salt domes and we're hardly lacking, on a global scale, in hydrogen bombs to conduct further studies.
Do you read 'The Independent' Science section by any chance? It's often re-purposed press release BS, without a shred of journalistic investigation or scepticism. Mind you 'Ars Technica' can be guilty of that, they promoted a story about a device that could pull moisture from the air and make water, supposedly without any energy input, and this was going to save the water starved world.
When I was living in Kentucky back in the 60s, the house we rented did not have air conditioning. My father removed the front panel of the gas furnace in the basement, reversed the connections on the room thermostat to run the fan when the temperature was high, and turned off the gas supply. He then opened one of the ground level windows on the North side of the building and strung a net curtain over the opening. The air coming in from under the adjacent bushes was relatively cool, the net curtain condensed the moisture, and the resulting cool air was circulated through the AC ducts throughout the house. The condensate was collected in a plastic planter trough and disposed of daily down the laundry room drain. When the weather turned colder in the autumn, he reverted it to a central heating role, which was how he left it when we returned to the UK.
Coastal California's redwood forests—with their lush ferns, towering trees and damp petrichor scent—might not seem to want for water, but they do face dry summers. To survive them, the trees, Sequoia sempervirens, grow specialized shoots with leaves that scrape moisture from the air.
That sort of "lost the superscripting" error occurs pretty much everywhere, including El Reg on occasions. Whenever I see a number 10xxx in print/pixels I automatically convert it mentally to 10xxx.
The Grauniad's appalling science(*) coverage is something else. I reckon they've become the left wing mirror image of the Mail, wanting only attention grabbing headlines to get an audience for their ads & "support us" begging rather than trying for sound reporting. These days I tend to read The Conversation more than the dailies.
(*) And technology, and economics, and …
"... they promoted a story about a device that could pull moisture from the air and make water, supposedly without any energy input ...."
That is easy. A simple sheet of plastic will do it. Not well, and not in any great volume per second, certainly not sufficient to tap into for drinking
water for millions of perople but it works at dawn in some deserts.
"... and this was going to save the water starved world."
Nah. It's just condensation from humid air on a relatively cool surface.
It's the process that makes dew. On a huge scale, it's very valuable. But like a lot of hese edge cases of physics, it isn't concentrated enough to
be technologically viable.
People do use it in deserts, though.
There ain't no such thing as a safe battery when its energy density is the same as or more than current lithium batteries. It's no accident that the main working ingredient is an alkali metal which reacts readily and exothermically with stuff, and ever more energetically as you go down the periodic table. Even a tank of petrol/gasoline is not safe if you don't treat it right, but we've had decades of experience of making safe containers for that stuff (bar the Pinto).
"Questioning data you provided isn't being a hater, pushing fake news or anything like that (despite what some politicians will tell you). It's required for good science."
Heck yea. Good science is all about "here's what we saw and what we think it means, now it's time for the smartest people in the field to try and poke holes in my idea".
Checking up on apatite, it seems that this is a group of minerals, so creating the Lead - Apatite - Copper amalgam with the correct type of apatite may need more information than presented, at least in the Register article. Still, if they have achieved room temperature one atmosphere superconductivity that is an exceptional achievement. People have won Noble prizes for less ( https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1987/summary/ , and in 1972 https://ieeecsc.org/awards/nobel-prize-physics#:~:text=In%201957%2C%20Bardeen%2C%20Cooper%20and,when%20a%20metal%20becomes%20superconducting. )
"Apatite is mineral group with the following chemical formula applied to the most common members of the primary group (excluding the extended Apatite supergroup):
Ca5(PO4)3(F,Cl,OH)
Individual Apatite minerals are:
Fluorapatite - Ca5(PO4)3F
Chlorapatite - Ca5(PO4)3Cl
Hydroxylapatite - Ca5(PO4)3OH"
https://www.minerals.net/mineral/apatite.aspx
According to their ArXiV preprint, "A material called LK-99, a modified-lead apatite crystal structure with the composition Pb$_{10-x}$Cu$_x$(PO$_4$)$_{6O}$ ($0.9<x<1.1$), has been synthesized..."
So now we know.
Cue race to repeat, and screw out a patent on anything the original researchers' agent missed. Rounded corners, perhaps?
If you regard $_ as "subscript" and replace {} with (), it turns into a completely regular chemical formula.
The basic ingredients are two metals found in scrapyards, and phosphate, available from piss.
I expect a slew of unsavoury youtube videos and another epidemic of cable thefts and church roof stripping...
Nearly. It looks like latex to me. So the {} are used to group things together, so the several characters can be put into a single subscript. The $ signs are to delimit the math mode; since apparently they want ordinary-font elements, but need math-mode for subscripts.
If you used e.g. A$_ax$, without the braces, you would get "A"-subscript-"a", followed by an "x"; but with A$_{ax}$ you get "A"-subscript-"ax"
Some of the comments were sceptical in the article (rightly so as would be a huge breakthrough if true).
If it is not a superconductor BUT is a very efficient electrical conductor at room temperature then would still be an important (& potentially v. useful achievement if useable materials could be spun out of it).
Although it would not have the exciting magnetic properties of a superconductor (lots of interesting uses of superconductors relate to magnetic properties), something that was "nearly" perfect in electrical conduction at "everyday" temperatures & pressures could still be very useful for reduced energy use - less "waste" heat generated in conduction = less initial energy input required.
Forgive me if I am completely wrong here, but I thought many of the "high temperature" (relative to liquid He) superconductors were very poor (i.e. lost superconductivity) at handling high currents or high magnetic flux levels. I.e. they are super conductors for modest currents, but no use for power distribution levels where such a saving would be of great commercial and environmental benefit.
Make it in sufficient bulk and current density at least won't be an issue; I think that'd help with magnetic fields too. Lead, copper, phosphorus and oxygen are fairly cheap. You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible.
Make it in sufficient bulk and current density at least won't be an issue
Easier said than done. For a start, the forces on superconductors are huge, and nobody has yet - as far as I am aware - managed to make High-Tc materials in sufficiently homogeneous bulk quantities to be useful for anything involving power.
You can make current high-Tc in bulk, the problem is you can't make wires. Currently you either cast the HTs material in situ or you scatter powder onto tape, either isn't great. It's why they weren't used for ITER
Currently this material seems to have very low (100mA) critical current and very low max field - but if those are just due to it being a lab bench mix rather than a refined product
You can make current high-Tc in bulk, the problem is you can't make wires. Currently you either cast the HTs material in situ or you scatter powder onto tape, either isn't great. It's why they weren't used for ITER
And when you make it in bulk it's incredibly weak, which makes it no use at all when all those I x B forces are applied. Superconductors have to be strong.
Currently this material seems to have very low (100mA) critical current and very low max field - but if those are just due to it being a lab bench mix rather than a refined product
Low critical current necessarily means low critical field and vice versa, because the critical current is what produces the critical self-field. Even if the results aren't fraud or delusion, I wouldn't place any bets on being able to improve significantly on the mix at the moment. And, of course, you'll never get much critical current (or field) near the critical temperature.
I was working in superconductors when Bednorz and Müller came out. Everyone got terribly excited; everybody tried to replicate and improve ... and thirty five years later High-Tc still isn't much more than a party trick. A levitating disk of YBCO or BSSCO loses its shock value quite soon.
Yep, bulk manufacture to bring costs down requires an economic industrial use case to drive the development. After all, the very first lasers were little more than expensive scientific curiosities with some applications in the research environment. Now, you can buy throwaway laser pointers and cat toys for pennies :-)
"You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible."
Actually, you'd probably want to figure out exactly why this works and then engineer a similar material that doesn't contain lead. A lead-based superconductor will certainly have applications, but since we are probably going to want superconducting this, that and the other all over the place it would be very nice to have one that is a little less toxic.
"You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible."
That turns into a materials science problem. Few would probably have believed flexible glass fibre was an economic possibility not that many years ago, let alone a world spanning network of them :-)
"hang them as wires", How do lightning strikes work on superconductors? Is there any heat without resistance and do we get a wave propagating through the whole of the superconducting network, rebounding at inappropriately terminated end points and causing fantastic EMR effects. This could make EMP weapons childs play. I ask purely as a Gedankenexperiment,
Such a superconductor would be incredibly useful.
Not necessarily. For a superconductor to be useful it has to have a high critical current, In most cases critical current reduces linearly with temperature to the critical temperature, so even if this material is superconducting at 127C it will have no current carrying capacity at that point.
Even so-called "High-Tc" materials (the ceramic superconductors) are generally useless in LN2 and have to be cooled much lower (usually in LHe) to have any application.
...is LaH10 at 170 GPa wit a critical temperature of 250K (roughly -23C).
Ambient pressure is approximately 100kPa.
So to have achieved such a reduction of the required pressure by several orders of magnitude would be beyond astonishing.
It will be wonderful if this replicates, but this falls into the "extraordinary claims/extraordinary proof" category of skepticism.
FWIW -- There were actually two groups working on cold fusion in Utah in the 1980s. One was Fleishmann and Pons notorious effort at Utah State. But 100 miles away at BYU, a guy named Steven Jones was working on something called Muon-catalyzed fusion. Also cold and theoretically perfectly sound if some practical problems can be overcome. Jones was only able to get about a third of the way to where he needed to be to have a possibly practical device. Others are still working on the concept. It's possible that some day they'll have real success. I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting.
There's a Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
"It could be used in MRI machines without the extreme cooling required, which has caused a shortage of helium."
So thousands of tons of helium that are used in party balloons, scientific/commercial cryogenics and space flight each year have no impact of the store of Helium then? What about the impact of the sell off of the USA's helium reservoir? What about reduced supply from oil wells (which is the primary source of helium)?
The US used to store a large amount of helium in a cave system. They have been selling it off since 2005 because there was no point keeping it around. When they started reserves of helium were "only" good for another 50 years. Now that the US national helium reserve is almost gone, reserves are only good for another 150 years.
Most oil and gas wells do not collect helium because it is not commercially viable. Find a new large use for helium and the price will go up until adding more helium collection does become profitable. Supply can expand to meet a huge increase in demand. If we cut back on helium use, less will be collected so it will get released into the atmosphere and escape into space. If we magically end oil and gas production there are still other possible sources.
We have had "we will run out of helium" panic headlines for decades. Perhaps in a few more decades our education system will prepare children to spot click-bait headlines.
The news is "fake"?
Which part?
Was a paper published?
Did they do what they said in the paper?
Did they achieve something which looks like superconductivity?
Was the temperature not what they said?
Was the pressure not what they said?
If mistakes have been made with the science, this is not "fake" news. It's real news of something, whether or not that turns out to be what it was initially thought to be.
By the way, if indeed "the laws of atomic physics do not support any form of superconductor at room temperature" then why are various teams attempting to do this?
I am not a physicist, don't downvote me for asking questions please.
Room temperature superconductors already exist (google superhydride superconductor) they just don't exhibit superconductivity at atmospheric pressure, so I'm gonna call hokum on the "laws of atomic physics" claim which probably should have been "the laws of thermodynamics" anyway even though they don't rule out room temp atmospheric pressure superconductivity.
Let me correct that for you:
The laws of Physics do not prohibit superconductivity under any particular circumstances.
Oh, and "there is no apatite for this story" - you missed an easy one there.
Unsupported humourless opinions fail on so many levels.
I've looked a the paper, it has all the hallmarks of genuine honest research, and all the expected behaviours of genuine superconductivity.
I, for one, have plenty of apatite for further progress...
I haven't read the paper, but someone who did said that it appeared to work (or have only been tested) at very low current densities. If it is a superconductor, but only handles fairly modest current, it won't be the Holy Grail for eliminating resistance on long distance electrical grids.
But even if it had limitations, but was superconducting at higher than the boiling point of water, it might point the way toward different types of superconductors one of which might handle high currents.
A low current superconducter would still be interesting in the realm of computer chips, if fabrication processes to deposit this material could be found.
Interesting points, there's plenty of opportunities even for low current superconductivity. It's early days on this one and current density will improve as sample quality becomes more homogenous.
Computer chips are worse than power grid - the limits in place today are due to electromigration, at current densities so high that the metal ions start to flow.
For signal electronics, zero-R inductors have infinite "Q" and are already in use in basestation filters - despite the cost and complexity of cooling. It would be great if they could be sold as ordinary components - allowing RF band filters with incredible performance in ordinary handheld devices.
If it can be made economic to use in mobile phones and laptops, manufacturers will be falling over themselves to invest if they can offer users and an extra hour or two between charges. After all, that's one of the primary driving forces in developing better batteries :-)
On a slightly more serious note, I'd not be surprised at all if that was the driving force to mass production of room temp, ambient pressure superconductors, assuming the science actually is good and reproducible. Doing the science is the "easy"[1] part. Commercial and economic production and "killer app" use case is the "hard" part, ie convincing industry to invest in something new.
[1] Comparatively :-)
If all the conductors in a desktop/laptop were able to be replaced with SUPERconductors, what would that mean?
Is the current in use low enough that the current density isn't an issue? Would it run stone cold and not need cooling? Would it run faster? Would it run longer on a battery charge? Not an electrical engineer, but want to know...
"If all the conductors in a desktop/laptop were able to be replaced with SUPERconductors, what would that mean?
Is the current in use low enough that the current density isn't an issue? Would it run stone cold and not need cooling? Would it run faster? Would it run longer on a battery charge? Not an electrical engineer, but want to know..."
Speaking as an electrical engineer, there's a very important law we engineers are taught which says "you can't always get what you want".
If we replaced the semiconductors and/or the resistors in the 'chips' with superconductors, unfortunately the chips wouldn't work any more.
In any computer there will be heat generated by current passing through the ordinary conductors in the machine, but a lot will be generated by the current which passes through the SEMIconductors in what we electronics engineers call the 'chips'. It's the chips in the computer which get hot, not the traces on the printed wiring boards. In fact the traces, usually copper (and so very good conductors *), are often used to conduct heat away from the components attached to them. The semiconductors are mostly made of very pure crystals of silicon which will never(**) be superconductors, and in any case there are lots and lots of resistors in the circuits in the chips, which are there in order to develop a potential difference across their ends when semiconductor devices pass current through them. The potential difference across a resistor is your logical value, '1' or '0', while it's being manipulated in the chip(***). Unfortunately passing a current through a resistor, in addition to generating a voltage, also generates heat proportional to the square of the voltage. A lot of work goes into reducing the voltage that's needed to unambiguously distinguish a '1' from a '0' in the presence of a lot of electrical noise, but there's a limit to what you can do in a very electrically noisy environment like the inside of a computer. I've glossed over a few other things but you get the picture.
Two things, more or less, limit the speed of the computer.
Firstly the thermal characteristics. Faster clock speeds means more power dissipated because you need to use higher currents to charge and discharge capacitances which you really wish weren't there but there's nothing much you can do about them; and the power has to be removed from the devices which generate it or they will destroy themselves.
Secondly the length of the wires. Because the speed of light is finite at about one foot per nanosecond, and we measure the switching speeds of many modern semiconductor devices in fractions of a nanosecond. The traces on the printed wiring boards between the chips are mostly transmission lines. At the moment at least, current density isn't a huge issue, but trace length is. Superconductors don't conduct signals especially faster than ordinary conductors - they're all limited by the speed of light. Current density *might* become an issue for superconducting circuits because of the magnetic field generated, which if it is strong enough may flip the superconductor out of its superconducting state, but right now we're a long way from worrying about that in your laptop.
(*) Metals are metals because they have free electrons in their crystal structure. In a metal, heat is primarily conducted by the free electrons. That's why metals conduct both electricity and heat well.
(**) Never say 'never' in engineering.
(***) There are chips (CMOS) which don't use resistors, they use transistors in place of the resistors, and that consumes a lot less power, but it also uses a lot more die area to make the same gates, so you can't make such a powerful processor with CMOS technology. That's just a real estate/manufacturing yield issue.
It sounds like you are saying, in effect, that we can't just replace bits of current electronics with superconductors to improve things in a meaningful way but might have to effectively develop a whole new range of components to take advantage of the effect, reinventing electronic circuits, which sounds entirely reasonable.
You do not need to replicate. Just give the sample to a recognised superconductor lab. They can easily decide if it really is a room temperature superconductor.
This could be a lot quicker because there may be some necessary trace elements or isotopes or procedure missing from the description.
That it levitates is quite encouraging. Though it does not prove it is a superconductor.
On page three of the recipe, it says that a mixture needs to be baked at 550C for 48 hours in a vacuum of 10^-3 torr and then another mixture baked at 925C for 5-20 hours in a vacuum of the same pressure.
However, the pressure indicated on the accompanying diagram shows 10^-3 mTorr
I may be confused but isn't that a thousand times smaller?
Technically you are right to be confused, but it's not uncommon to see a graph axis with values of say 1,2,3 x 10^-6, and also labelled "micro"-units. It's duplication of exponent. In this case, they mean the mantissa numbers are in millitorr, that's my most likely interpretation.
The paper looks a bit rushed, not surprising given the Nobel prizes possibly at stake, and to me this adds authenticity to the claims. They might be wrong, but they're honest.