Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor Scientists are struggling to verify South Korean eggheads' claim to have synthesized a material that exhibits superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure. Late last month, researchers at the Quantum Energy Research Centre in Seoul, along with others, published a paper claiming that a material they called LK-99 is …
Seems to be largely hyperbole at this point, and for a material that was actually created 24 years ago.
All the created samples appear to be miniscule as well, which seems odd for something that uses basic materials.
As with all science - until you can reproduce it independently, it's at best a fluke or misreading, at worst a fraud.
Selling it as a room-temperature superconductor, especially, appears to be largely nonsense. And diamagnetic properties are hardly rare.
Like with every battery-technology claim, every "AI" claim, every super-material breakthrough - until it's literally a commodity item (even if that commodity is a £1m per sample thing sold only to labs), it's basically just hyperbole.
As with all science - until you can reproduce it independently, it's at best a fluke or misreading, at worst a fraud
It probably is the scientists misinterpreting their findings of what is undoubtably an odd material. There are however two ways to determine if it really is a superconductor. The first is for other labs to make and test it, but these attempts are failing. Secondly other labs could test the existing "superconductor" sample that the Korean team has made. Even if no one else can independently make it, others could independently test it properly to determine if it actually is a superconductor. I suspect the Korean team will not allow this to happen. Till they do it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat ..... but with an odd smell coming from the box.
I'll push back on the issue with the samples being miniscule. You generally work on ~gram scale processes until you know you're making it right and what conditions are strictly necessary for a quality product. Only then do you begin working on scale-up, which is rather often someone else' job. In grad school I started my work making materials out of basic materials and producing batches of about 0.4 g for years before I had a need for larger batches for a study with another lab and managed to scale up to ~7.0 g
That said, I kind of doubt this is really the standard temp and pressure superconductor that everyone has been hoping for. I suspect it is just some sloppy science and an over-excited team. This does happen pretty often, and you hope that it gets worked out among scientists, but once mass media is involved things do get more complicated. I suspect we will be hearing about this one occasionally by fringe conspiracists for many years to come: same as the 'talking to water makes crystals pretty' and 'cold fusion' situations.
I hope I am proved wrong, but this seems like a scheme designed to attract venture capiital. After all, the first person who builds a superconductor that works at room termperature is going to make an awful lot of money very quickly, so venture capitalists are likely frotthing at the bit to get in on this, and will likely throw money at it like crazy.
Whoever invented it can work on the material for a few months, living off the investment, and possibly disappear with the money, saying "Sorry, didn't work".
This last thing is something I suspect will happen with at least one of the current hyperloop projects..
<quote>One of those attempting to reproduce LK-99 is Andrew McCalip, an engineer at Varda Space Industries in California, who expressed concern that the paper describing LK-99 is unhelpfully vague on the processes used to create the purported superconductor.</quote>
Sums up the problem very well!
It is very difficult to explain that your sample comes in fact from Area-51, and you spent the last 25 years trying to find a process that would allow the recreation of a look-alike material, but in this case likely without the superconductor properties of the original.
Then you just tell your esteemed colleagues that it can be done, and hope that someone will find the exact process...
Starting to get a distinct Hwang Woo-suk fraud vibe from all of this, unfortunately.
If this turns out to be another fraud then the Korean science community could find itself in a very unfavourable situation.
Fool me once, and all that.
...At least we will get two, maybe three, good things out of it:
1.) A novel class materials that may be able to help scientist push past current limitations in unknown fields. Just reading about the potential of forcing some atoms to a higher energy state based on the inexpensive materials and process used is educational, at least to me. It's a bit like forcing water to slow up hill.
2.) Someone will no doubt document all of this in great detail and post it on their TikTok as a summary of what works and what doesn't.
3.) Some people investing currently investing in AI are now eying superconductor research.
...I can't say yes or no for sure. It depends on how much they are willing to humble themselves before God, History, or Science.
If you are just a Creationist then you know we are made in the Image of God but tainted by sin (which means we have an imperfect copy of God's Mind) and if you are just a Historian then you know what the victors wrote (which means we may never know the truth), and if you are just a Scientist you know every solution presents more problems (which means that no one can ever give a complete answer on their own). No matter which, they will learn what they want to by watching.
The worst thing they could learn is that there are simple answers these questions about how energy and matter are the same but different. I don't know who said it first, but even Albert Einstein didn't foresee the fullness of Relativity.
It sounds like even the original team may not quite know how to make it - i.e. there is some element of luck getting the lead atoms to get to the right place throughout the entire material, without which it will not work (or may only partially work if enough of the crystals are correct)
So I think it is premature to rule it out, just like it was premature to publish. Unfortunately one of their number deciding to publish before they were ready (which may have taken years longer given how long they've been working with this material) forced the issue.
That may be better in the long run though, with others working on it results will come more quickly if there's something there. Even if there's nothing there LLNL seems to believe the atomic structure is interesting enough for further research, and it may point us in new directions.
"...may not quite know how to make it - i.e. there is some element of luck..."
When reading the article I was reminded of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll's original potion worked, but none of his subsequent batches did in spite of him sourcing purer ingredients. It turned out that it was some unknown impurities in the original batch of ingredients that made his potion work.
It could be bollocks, it could also be that the material in part works as advertised but they don't really know how or why.
"It turned out that it was some unknown impurities in the original batch of ingredients that made his potion work."
Reminded of this Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evV05QeSjAw - wherein the holes in Swiss cheese were disappearing because everything's too clean these days -- it takes a certain amount of straw dust to give the hole-causing bacteria something to nucleate on.
See also the loss and subsequent recreation of the recipe for the aerogel used in US nuclear weapons (look up FOGBANK), wherein -- again -- an impurity in the process turned out to be essential.
I remember a short story, but not the author, where a scientist gets talking to a veteran soldier in a bar. He's a veteran of every war since the Spanish Succession. An alchemist cured his injuries with an elixer and he hadn't aged and healed from all wounds ever since. The alchemist was killed, he got the recipe, learned to read it and had tried for centuries to reproduce it but went back to soldiering as the only thing he really knew. It was all simple stuff, like vinegar and honey but the question became which bees, feeding from which varieties of plants, in what proportion and which grapes went into the vinegar.
Yet another similar tale:
One early-generation "drum machine" (drum-sounding electronic box) got its signature sound, particularly the bass/kick drum, from some flawed transistors from a dodgy source, but it was the perfect sound for its time. The company started running out of said transistors and couldn't find any more -- normal pieces were unflawed, therefore useless for the sound -- so they stopped production. (I'd give a link but I forgot the make and model.)
It was the Roland TR-808 (pretty much THE 80s drum machine). They did eventually find a way to recreate the sound closely enough without the need for the flawed transistor. https://secretlifeofsynthesizers.com/the-strange-heart-of-the-roland-tr-808/
I was told (many many moons ago, whilst at Polytechnic) that Stainless Steels were discovered by accident when armaments boffins were trying to develop better armour plate for tanks and / or battleships. The test piece didn't show promise so got put in the stack of "not quite" materials. A while later, it was noticed that one of the "not quite" pieces hadn't gone rusty like the others ...
And a response to the original poster: @DS999 "there is some element of luck getting the lead atoms to get to the right place throughout the entire material". I was thinking a similar thing, but I was thinking that maybe a mechanism like Age Hardening* was occurring in the Koreans' material which hasn't happened in other test pieces - yet.
* (IIRC) Precipitation of impurities from crystals in the alloy. In the case of AH, the precipitate forms nodules between the crystals that act in a similar manner to aggregate in concrete.
This is why the production of Tamahagene (Japanese steel) involved a lot of tradition*. They didn't have the science hundreds of years ago to find which process steps were significant. So they always took time for prayer at the local Shinto temple at the same time when firing the kiln. So if time was a factor, repeating the same prayers produced consistent results.
*A lot of their artisanal craft work still does.
My thoughts were about the same. The crucible was bumped, a stray magnetic field, something not considered as non ordinary effected the processing and since the original sample the curse of a very rare event has the lab trying to duplicate the results. Who knows a neutrino interaction (a rare event) at the precise time that a subtle change in material properties would occur. Classicalists what is quote about the gods and driving man crazy?
Do you know how genetic scientists teach other labs to do their methods?
The recipe is fairly simple:
Take one researcher who knows how to do the method, and all the EXACT same materials that they used; same suppliers, same glassware, same disposables, same everything.
Repeat the method using the above kit, and repeat until it works reliably (which it never does at first).
When working, lead a researcher at the new lab through the method, step by step. When they can do it, teach others.
When several people can do the method, one by one swap the materials from the remote lab for ones available locally. Modify method as needed.
This is KNOWN behaviour; it really is not surprising that a complex method cannot be reliably copied using just a paper. Indeed, research materials that are supposed to be equivalent from different suppliers can actually be very different; in my old field of research the agar gel used by European researchers and American ones was subtly different; this meant that setting up diffusion gradients of sex pheromones took mere hours in Europe and ten times as long in the USA.
Yes, I was working on sex pheromones. Yes, videotaping was involved. No, the videos have not survived the test of time.
...this meant that setting up diffusion gradients of sex pheromones took mere hours in Europe and ten times as long in the USA.
Ah, science. The need to demonstrate something experimentally that could be achieved by simple observation in bars and clubs in both Europe and the USA. My theory involves Hollywood and the way many Americans are brought up to learn that sex=death.
But I digress. Seems to me a case of premature publication and a weakness in the peer-review process, at least outside the Journal of Irreproducable Results. Given the commercial considerations, I can understand the researchers being a bit coy about the recipe, but the reviewers should have been shown how to reproduce it to validate the results and pass for publication.
That's France's privilege, it's built into their language. La petite mort.
I like that expression. But the US may be mayflies given the Mayflower and all that, and they're still a bit puritan. But more to do with the way Hollywood explains the birds and the bees. Get frisky with the babysitter, in the car, or on a camping trip and the next thing you know, it's axes, power tools and screaming. I think this explains why the US sex hormones move much slower.. they're just terrified.
I does seem that in every US horror or thriller film since at least the 80s, anyone, particularly young people, who engages in extra-marital sex is guaranteed to be murdered.
A very weird Eros => Thanatos mix.
Mind you, this is a country that in some states at least officially teaches abstinence as a form of contraception...
The shame is in the media doping. If it had just been "among scientists" it would just be normal science. But by having tasted brief media fame the hangover will be horrendous - which is of course more reason to double down and dig the hole deeper.
In fairness it would be extremely funny if the secret of superconductivity turned up in a post by some AManFromMars wannabe rando on the Reg forums and nobody noticed because it was so clearly nonsense.
Final Report to the Galactic Council:
We surreptitiously informed the subject planet of the standard list of technologies to avoid technological extinction (high temperature superconductivity, economic portable controlled fusion, anti-gravity, etc) but they totally failed to use any of them. Thus we conclude the dominant planetary species should be allowed to make themselves extinct, and that remediation crews should clean up the mess afterwards in order to give orang utans a chance for Galactic citizenship.
"The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
So, even Douglas Adams misinterpreted the final dolphin speech then? They were the Galactic Council representatives :-)
I will disclose the full formula shortly but the basic process is that you electron beam sinter less than 5 micron grains of Yttrium Copper Oxide ceramic interspersed with the grains of Garnet of less than 20 microns and 10 micron grains of Bismuth and Gallium. Gallium sintering is hard to do because of its low melting point so we freeze everything in liquid nitrogen first and then intersperse all the grains and sinter in a Z-pattern. The grains form hard boundary amorphous crystalline patterns and if i am not mistaken, the full electrical conductivity is similar to the Skin Effect but at the micron level on the surface of the the grain structure!
I'm not a materials scientist so this is a very basic description of the process. Temperatures for full superconductivity are tested from -100 C to +300 C
You've got the information! Use it!
V
Mr Negitivity what is so bad about this. It appears in these days if it causes a blood pressure lowering chuckle it is a target for a downer. It was been occupying more of my musing that downer should provide an explanation as why. Myself having read something the was cogent, literate, and used sound logical construction but I thought the author totally deranged an got up tick because it was cogent, literate, and used sound logic(though using a weird premise or three). I for one got both Dr. Pangloss and The Life of Brian's closing but it just entered into this thought process that there were those that had a stick up their ... making them very inflexible who protested the works in which Pangloss and Brian were used.
Read 'Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown" or Worm Runners Digest or not - probably too painful because it is humor. One of the four that make humans human!
That came out of FIVE BILLION dollars worth of supercomputer data mining
Take it from one who knows. You were close with the Yttrium-Oxygen-Garnet, but you still need to assemble sulphur monoxide, a couple of thalliums and another oxide before you reach enlightenment. Which may or may not involve tentacles. Much of the research in this field was tragically lost in a fire in Dr Whateley's Dunwich laboratory disaster.
It's Yttrium Copper Oxide grains interspersed with common Garnet (which has multiple formulas) and pure Bismuth and pure Gallium.
The key effect is nanoscale Surface Wave superconductivity along the surfaces of the electron beam sintered amorphous crystalline grain structures at -100 C up to +300 C temperatures.
We can machine the resulting ceramic into long one cm diameter tubes tens of metres in length. Making a flexible CABLE usable for short hundred metre and multi-km distance superconductive electrical transmission is NCA's (North Canadian Aerospace) NEXT project!
V
"Try the formula" he says, as if it's some kind of magic wand.
The formula of a compound just by itself only measures the relative quantities of the given elements molecularly bound together. It tells you almost nothing about how they're bound. A large part of the argument going on about LK99 right now is around the exact crystalline structure of the material, how those crystals are aligned, which lead atoms in the structure have been replaced by copper etc. and how to achieve the desired structure reliably.
I'll tactfully ignore the fact that you say Ytrtium [sic] Copper Oxide but the two formulae you present are not only lacking in both Yttrium and Copper, but aren't even all that similar to each other. Mostly because I think it's worthwhile discussing what a formula represents in material science and what it does not.
Sorry! I forgot the Barium!
aka Y Ba2 Cu3 O7 (Garnet: Mg3 Al2 Si3 O12 ...OR... Mn3 Al2 Si3 O12) Ga2 03 Bi2 O3
as a high temperature, normal air pressure superconductor from -100 C to +300 C
AND if you want to get technical, you can replace the Ga2 O3 with Sc2 O3 which reduces the high point of the superconductivity
to less than 6O C instead of the 300 C of the Gallium compound BUT that version is easier to make and CNC machine!
Electron Beam Sinter in a Z-pattern of interspersed 5 to 20 micron grains of the ceramic compounds to form
an amorphous crystalline ceramic that SEEMS to use surface wave (skin effect) electron flow on the surface
of the crystalline grain structures to effect the superconductivity!
Now You Know! Give it a TRY!
V
Done! All Worldwide Free and Open Source Under GPL-3 Licence Terms For You!
Formula for High Temperature Superconducting Ceramic Compound:
Y Ba2 Cu3 O7 (Garnet: Mg3 Al2 Si3 O12 ...OR... Mn3 Al2 Si3 O12) Ga2 03 Bi2 O3
Not sure why they are currently NOT using the Calcium-based Garnet compounds in the recipe but it works!
Somebody external NEEDS to take a look at the above formula! Do note that the Gallium Oxide (Ga2 03) compound
can also be replaced with a Scandium Oxide (Sc2 O3) for Sintering and CNC machinability reasons!
Layer by Layer Electron Beam sintering in a Z-pattern of 5-to-20 micron interspersed grains of each ceramic and
oxide compound seems to be best way and then CNC machine into a long tube shape for -100 C to +300 C operation.
Flexible Cable Version using much faster and cheaper extrusion techniques coming soon!
V
If you are genuinely done and have accurately tested this, I advise writing a paper on it and submitting it to a handful of science journals for proper peer review. The article even mentions one or two of these journals.
Remember, show your working. Every step of how you produced your wonder material, including your raw material sources, equipment used and where you sourced your equipment. Explain in great detail each and every test you performed on your material to prove it's superconductivity, including each and every measurement. Include the data from that $5 billion of super-computer time (though you may want to include that as an appendix). The idea is that other properly equipped scientists should be able to replicate your material and experiment without question.
If you've already done everything you claim to, that Nobel Prize is as good as yours. I look forward to seeing the name StargateSg7 in the news as the person who heralded in a new age for humanity.
Because I don't have an Electron Beam sintering machine in my pocket to test this and as such am unable to conclusively prove whether you're a genuine scientist excited about his latest world-changing discovery posting about it on his favourite IT forum or a troll trying to improve his own self image by saying "I've already done this, it was obvious, now you do it".
All materials were sourced from and made in Canada. I should note that i am NOT part of the material sciences team that created these compounds. I'm merely the public mouthpiece!
In terms of manufacture, a cheap green CO2 LASER of a few hundred dollars should work fine for the layer by layer micron-scale laser sintering using a cheap laptop for pulse control and patterning. Electron beam merely has higher resolution down to 7 nm for precise grain melting purposes.
Simple ceramic powder grinders and electric mixers are enough to mix the base ingredients together as oxides for less than a few hundred dollars.
A modified Epson ink jet printer can ALSO be used to place individual grains of ceramic and metal oxides in precise places on a flat bed and the CO2 LASER will melt them together to form a block of superconducting material.
Our only issue was the time needed to obtain high purity Gallium and Scandium due to current supply shortages.
We are simply disclosing ALL processes and systems under Worldwide Free and Open Source GPL-3 Licence Terms. It's an easy-to-repeat process and easily duplicatable result!
Have at it!
P.S. We at NCA (North Canadian Aerospace) are working on simple high pressure powder mixing and hot extrusion to create a flexible cable version of this -100 C to +300 C Superconductor and will ALSO disclose that process as free and open source!
V
> I should note that i am NOT part of the material sciences team that created these compounds. I'm merely the public mouthpiece!
Then you are doing a spectacularly bad job at it. I've been watching Linus Tech Tips like you suggested by the way, and none of your super-duper world changing inventions haven't been shown yet - can you confirm when they are going to be on?
Like everything you have ever spouted on here, I imagine they're "coming soon!!"
Give it up.
Ironically, since Linus'es offices are literally 30 minutes away from me (He's in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada and I'm at NCA in Vancouver on the OTHER SIDE of the Fraser River!), I've already emailed their staff as to their cargo bay door dimensions for a soon-to-be delivery that will drop off a rather large box filled with our 128-bits wide supercomputer gear for them to review. They didn't seem to believe me as to what we were offering them though!
Our head honchos recently approved a directive to simply have said container delivered GRATIS to their door so I am assuming LTT should be getting the our 22 foot diagonal 65,536 by 40,960 pixel (64 bit RGBA colour LASER emitter display at 240 Hz refresh and full 240 fps capable uncompressed stream fibre data connector), the 128-bits wide DragonSlayer Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector CPU (575 TeraFLOPS at 60 Ghz) computing system to attach to the super-display AND the custom-coded multi-application toolbar and real-time custom-built-from-scratch Object-Oriented OS and File System that runs it all fairly soon now.
We are also sending LTT a 22.2 Channel Surround Sound system (32-bits per sample at 192 kHz sample rate per channel!). We're even sending LTT a 250 KW Ballard Fuel Cell (i.e. is super-quiet!) since the speaker system alone is 100,000 Watts. We also have our ruggedized milspec 810-G/K and IP-68/69-rated portable lunchbox computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones and our 16:10 aspect ratio 120 mm by 75 mm RGB sensor 64K resolution Cinema Camera and Cinema Lenses as part of the package to review and disclose publicly! Marques Brownlee and Lou will ALSO be getting the same systems at the same time as LTT so they can do a cooperative unveiling and review.
It's gonna be QUITE THE SHOCK to Intel, AMD, IBM (Power10), ARM (Apple/Samsung/Qualcomm) and a few others since we will be SELLING those products once they are disclosed at unheard of prices! The EU, JP, AU/NZ, USA-FCC, CAN-DOC certifications should be ready later this month so we can actually sell everything RIGHT AWAY once it's announced and reviewed.
We have OTHER products to disclose publicly, but those above ones will do for now!
V
I'm having a bit of fun with all of this to put in some SERIOUS ONLINE BUILD-UP before our REALLY BIG DAY!
I should note that YOU ARE NOT my actual intended audience (i.e. a hearty Willkommen to those at "The Forte", "The Company", "The Stone Ghosters and the local Migits (sp)" --- BUT Dew Gow Laya Fey Jais to the KiloLimas and the GuanoBoos!!!)
When we are ready to pounce publicly we will do so!
We (and I PERSONALLY!) have been preparing for this a VERY VERY LONG TIME!
All that work ready to be shown publicly.
P.S. Your time is coming Pug.....Your time is coming a LOT sooner than you think.....
"For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."
--- It Will Be Done! ---
V
"..it would likely revolutionize industry by, for example, making it possible to eliminate losses due to electrical resistance in power grids."
Transmission and distribution losses are less than 10% in the UK. How would removing this "revolutionize" industry? At best it would reduce electricity costs by 10% after National Grid had recouped the cost of replacing all its lines with this wonder material - assuming it can be strung between pylons.
Offer anyone in any mature industry the possibility of improving their process efficiency by 2-3% and they would bite your hand off. 11% improvement (if it goes from 90% to 100% efficiency) would be a huge game-changer (10% is an upper-limit estimate on losses but even at the lower estimate of around 7%, going to 0% would be a big gain). Estimated electric power lost in transmission in UK is 25TWh (2021). Taking a sample generating cost of 10p/kWh, the cost of the losses amounts to £2.5 bn / year.
Of course, replacing the existing grid is a gigantic capital project that would cost hundreds of billions over the course of decades. And without a relatively cheap room-temp superconductor it's pie-in-the-sky anyway. Grid-scale requires vast amounts of material so any real-world application would also necessarily be smaller-scale at first eg power-hungry industrial applications, electric cars....
Don't disagree that it would be a welcome benefit, but how would it "revolutionize" industry? Pick an industry - say I make bicycles or furniture or lawn mowers. How is my industry going to be revolutionized by getting power 10% cheaper? Even if electricity were an unlikely 25% of my input costs then I save 2.5% - assuming all the savings are passed on. All my competitors will get the same saving, so no competetive benefit. Perhaps it would make steelmaking viable again in the UK?
The Spinning Jenny, steam power, iPhone - they all revolutionized industry, but I don't see how slightly cheaper electricity would. It would
It might if you think of new applications. Say transmitting power over very long distances which is impossible now and not done because of huge losses, say 90% over a few thousand miles changing to 10%. Or transmitting energy from A to B back to A which might be useful but a huge waste today.
It doesn't need a competitive benefit to revolutionize industry. If it allows things to be done that were not possible before, many competitors could enter a field where before there was none or a sole monopolist. It also doesn't have to be a giant conceptual or large-step change to revolutionise industry, just enough small improvements that reach a tipping point. If something can't be done because it's not economically viable but a 5-10% increase in productivity means you can operate at a slight profit rather than at a loss.
eg electric cars needing 50 kWh battery instead of 60 kWh battery for the same range, bringing an electric car price down to the same price or less as the ICE equivalent
And then there's the savings in the generation of the 'leccy in the first place. What might the wind turbine or solar panel efficiency be if we have access to "room temp" superconductors? not to mention hydro and/or traditional generators? But as so many have said, it's all pie in the sky at the moment. A bit like those conversations you may have with friends about what you'd do if you won the lottery jackpot :-)
Offer anyone in any mature industry the possibility of improving their process efficiency by 2-3% and they would bite your hand off
That depends what it would cost. As you yourself note, this investment would be enormous, and the payback period correspondingly huge. I'm pretty sure the (multiple) companies who maintain the networks have other things they'd rather spend money on, than saving less-than-10% of a resource that, let's face it, they're not paying for anyway.
And once again I feel obliged to point out that superconductors (well, Type 2 superconductors, which are the only useful ones) are only loss free for DC. Even when they are superconducting they develop heat when carrying AC.
Why? Because magnetic flux partially penetrates them with every cycle. Changing magnetic flux -> voltage, voltage x current = power.
I spent two years of my life a long time ago developing standardised tests for this.
Other materials already exist that superconduct at 220-280K (-53 - +7 C) at very high pressures, or at 138K (-135 C) at normal pressure. But that uses quite exotic materials. So a -163C superconductor out of more common (cheaper) materials would already be a big boost.
A superconductor with a critical temperature near 77K would be useless, because critical current scales linearly as temperature rises and falls to zero at the critical temperature, That's why in the few instances where High-Tc materials have a use, they usually run in LHe, because a material with a Tc of 80K (say), has 25 times the critical current at 4.2K that it has at 77K.
If a room temperature superconductor is every found - and I am not holding my breath - it will probably run in LN2 or maybe dry ice.
..."We've learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science...
"...The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
--R.P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
On the video supplied by the Korean team, they push the sample around and it suddenly drops to the surface of the magnet. This could happen with Meissner effect because there is a critical field above which it fails. This does not affect diamagnets. The sample could be a small magnet, but that would be trivial to test by flipping it over.
Given they seem to be competing for the Nobel prize, they do seem to think it is genuine.
We need a third party to test the samples.
This is all fake like Cold Fusion. Dozens of scientific institutions around the world are trying to replicate the findings without any success and it's not even clear who wrote the paper making the claims.
I believe this will all turn out to be a wild goose chase.Considering the enormous implications if it were true this makes sense, but the original authors should step forward and demonstrate superconductivity or forever hold their tongue.
Had a chat 40 odd years ago with a bloke who did microwave waveguides. He was quite convincing about how superconducting just required waveguides in the 'crystalline' structure to be large enough for the electrons to scoot down without touching the sides. Of course as temperatures rise the waveguide shrinks and as distances increase the likely hood of thermal interference by the waveqgude increases.
I'm thinking its possible to make crystal that works in one lab and gets their hopes up and yet wont play in another. Of greater concern is making these things work of useful distances. Labs seem happy with several orders of magnitude less than something useful being a superconductor when it would fail to be one over a cm or two.
Early FO experiments were done with hollow tubes. Different coatings on the glass (graphene of course) may work.
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