This stuff is so 2023
This stuff is so 2023
Some background: there were two Chinese teams publicly pursuing LK-99-derived room temperature superconductor, which I arbitrarily named "north China team" and "south China team". North China team was headed by Hongyang Wang (who lives in Beijing) and south China team was headed by Yao Yao (who lives in Guangzhou). They used different synthesis and different analysis, i.e. north China team used hydrothermal synthesis and used SQUID measurement, while south China team used solid state synthesis and used EPR measurement.
This is a joint paper of both teams. They reproduced results of each other (this is unclear in the paper, but stated in their behind-the-scene posts) and measured a clear sign of superconductivity. It is "near room temperature", because they are sure about 250 K (hence "near"), but not sure about 300 K. As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty.
If you are interested, you definitely want to read behind-the-scene posts. Read them here: https://www.zhihu.com/question/637763289 (they are in Chinese). Hongyang Wang is 真可爱呆 and Yao Yao is 洗芝溪.
How does 250 K compare to current[1] superconductors?
[1] pun definitely intended.
250 K at ambient pressure is still revolutionary, as it can be reached by dry ice. The highest critical temperature at ambient pressure had been something like 150 K: still above boiling point of liquid nitrogen, and won Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.
One would think with all of our crazy AI and supercomputers and quantum computers that a team would give it evolutionary goals of just trying simulations of molecular combinations to reach superconductivity. Sure, it'd be one thing to make it in a computer, and making the materials in the real world is quite another but I'm kind of shocked no one has come forward with something yet. I saw simulations of whole viruses running on a cluster of computers where they test drugs out and how they interact with the virus and simulated human cells so one would think its something with enough effort would be possible?
There's plenty of researchers working on material simulation on a molecular level. It's not easy to just search millions of possible combinations and accurately predict their behavior
I believe that the fundamental physical particle interactions are not yet well enough understood to make a precise simulation, even if you had a supercomputer.
Ie. currently it can't be formulated as a search problem entirely on a computer.
Isn't the whole point that it's something we might not predict from what we understand about the materials so far? Why would it be likely that a simulation would do better than theory at predicting unknown experimental results?
You might hit on some interesting interactions between known properties that haven't been investigated but I would assume the real interesting results are from things we just don't know to model, or how to model.
Quantum computers are still not useful, fwiw.
This is done across many disciplines to try and aide in new discovery paths. Typically you’re limited in exactly what you can simulate and often times solution candidates may be found that are impractical, currently impossible, or perhaps actually impossible to produce. Sometimes you can add search constraints to tie simulations together to narrow down such false positive solutions found but not always. Heck in some cases it’s literally cheaper and more accurate to do the bench science no matter how alluring virtualized renditions may be.
Most fields are still left with piles and piles of potential solutions to sort through. They often select candidates that are the cheapest and most practical to approach or they have high suspicion of success and pursue those. At the end of the day though we don’t have full universe simulators at every scale we’d want, we have very specific area simulators within very specific bounds. You have to go out an empirically test these things.
But this is and has already been going on for decades across most disciplines I’ve interacted with, they just weren’t using DNN or LLMs at the time but domains are adopting these as well to leverage where feasible in the search process.
I work with a variety of people interested in leveraging simulation and everyone wants to take the successes they see in LLMs or say RL from AlphaStar or AlphaGo and apply them in their domain. It’s alluring, I get it, the issue is that we often lack enough real understanding in domains and the science isn’t as airtight and people think it is, its too general or narrow, or on some cases we have good suspicion of how to build better more accurate simulations but there’s not enough compute power or energy in the world to make them currently practical, so we need to take some tradeoffs and live with less accurate and detailed simulation which leads to inaccurate representations of reality and ultimately inaccurate solution suggestion candidates.
You far overestimate the state of the art, and even our basic understanding of what superconducting is mechanistically. Simulating a single atom, alone in the universe is still a struggle not quite achieved.
I grew up in Minnesota, and I have to laugh that 250 K is -9.67 F, and yeah, we had a lot of days like that. It's amazing to think that future childhood toys could be superconducting outside on those cold Minnesota days.
Ask your hometown to build an antigravity skating rink with magnet shoes.
“Those boards don’t work on water!”
I laugh but also sad I’m betting a lot of the younger HN crowd doesn’t get the reference.
Movies of the 80s and 90s feel a lot more modern compared to the “old movies” we had living in the 80s. Black and white movies with cardboard acting sure felt quaint for the tv generation.
Today though I’m constantly surprised by the number of young people who recognize things from 80s movies and especially music. I’d say that number is higher compared to our generation.
Let's hope this paper doesn't just join the list of broken promises we were made in the 80's
I envision a future where maglev trains whisk you to ice fishing.
Ice cream freezers reach 248K, so if it's really the case, then sufficient devices are already mass produced.
You'd have to clean out all the ice cream though.
Sounds like a delicious problem to solve.
Happy to help with clearing out the Ice Cream...
The lowest temperature a freezer can achieve is typically around -23 degrees Celsius (-9 degrees Fahrenheit).
Jokes like that are going to get a lot of resistance. Oh well, time to amp it up.
Best chart I could find. Looks like there's another at 250 K from 2019. But what I don't have here is the Temperature / Pressure / Timeline, though...? What is the Pressure in the article? Is it STP?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity#/media/File:...
The article is STP. 250 K from 2019 in the linked image is "@ 170 GPa", as shown.
That is 1,5 to 1,6 million times atmospheric pressure...Slightly impractical?
250K is -23,15°C This post because, laziness is a science...
As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty.
It's not false modesty to withhold a conclusion that is unwarranted without more evidence. The last time this happened there was also "possible Meissner effect" that turned out to be diamagnetism.
There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
That's true, but one upside here is that this is not from the guy at Rochester who already got burned twice for publishing false superconductor discoveries. This is at least a report that can't be dismissed immediately.
I don't know who you're referring to "from Rochester", but the excitement from last summer around LK-99 came from two South Korean researchers. Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data.
To be clear, I don't mean to cast unnecessary shade on these current results, I'm just saying the sane and prudent thing to do, especially given LK-99's recent history, is to hold off on any champagne popping, and that appropriate restraint shouldn't be characterized as "false modesty".
Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data.
Which we should be critical of, but understandable, since that's one of the main reasons to publish (and why I think it is weird we say arxiv papers aren't peer reviewed. That was probably one of the most peer reviewed works in the last decade) and since we're all human. Science is full of mistakes, and is unsurprising when a lot of it is literally trying to do things that humans have never done before (much more to science than this too).
What I thought was really cool about LK-99 is that it isn't too often that people get a first hand look at what goes on inside the science communities. An abnormal amount of attention and openness, but illustrative. Just not sure this is the takeaway people got. But I saw science working in action, and it was really cool.
There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
There are, but I'd agree that there aren't downsides we should be concerned with. The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I'd agree this is dumb, but it is a thing I've seen happen, and be not too uncommon. Just comes down to metrics: academics are judged by citations and number of papers published, thus papers are written to reviewers as opposed to peers (not necessarily the same thing, but assumed they are), also incentivizes flashy results to generate more publicity, or overselling the novelty of work (sometimes even by mistake). But otherwise I agree, and I think it should be encouraged to take a more tempered approach (I think it'll also really help build back social trust in sciences (again, small part of a larger pie)).
So, we're back?
What in the post is false modesty?
What is the pressures required for the effect? Are there other requirements that limit it's practical usage.
So they've possibly discovered a material wlthat may have a property that could be indicative of superconductivity at room temperature? It's a shame I don't have any popcorn handy.
I do however appreciate their dedication to not putting the word superconductor in the title.
Give the cesspit formerly known as Twitter a couple of hours and they'll be breaking out the laser eyes again, buzzword in the paper or not.
I know it looks silly but what was wrong with being optimistic about what would be the biggest physical discovery since the transistor? Acting like an expert when you’re not is something that I’d say happens on HN just as often as on Twitter. Learn to let it go
There's difference between raising hope and raising hype. Those Twitter gurus ride on any wave convincing of people of whatever they can just to get more traffic. It's mostly harmless until you find people obsessing over updates and start betting on it.
This - these aren't hopeful people with a layman's understanding cheering on the scientific method, they're hype bros looking to gather gullible followers and shill cryptocurrencies to them based on yet another thing they're utterly clueless about and don't care to inform themselves on.
I love "They-ing" because if it's even lightly questioned someone will jump in to explain they know They, and add even more qualifiers. Ex. if we weren't on HN "tech bros" and "AI hype" would start being invoked.
EDIT: I was wrong! On HN too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38854412
I don’t think this is true. When I heard of LK-99, I remember talking of my friends about it and we sort of daydreamed about what it could mean for society if true. None of us are on social media anymore (except HN if you count that).
Sometimes you just get excited, or want to be excited. Otherwise it’s back to wake up, work, eat dinner, sleep. When cool stuff seems to be happening, why wouldn’t we talk about it? Even if it ends up being a dud, it’s still something to talk about out.
Those "twitter gurus" were actively trying to recreate the paper, and a lot of those "twitter gurus" are actual founders doing actual hardtech startups with relevant degrees and labs.
People will bet on literally anything. That's their own problem, not mine.
You know you can block and mute people on Twitter, right? The actual true grifters of the kind you are talking about are pretty rare in terms of a per user basis (though get get lots of distribution), and most of them are very bad at concealing themselves.
That's way better than people dunking on lk-99 in the name of "science", quick to judge themselves while criticizing early results as too quick to judge
HN was absolutely choked with the same sort of would-be experts, reading the Wikipedia page for Superconductors and trying to post their way into a position of authoritative knowledge. Certainly there are more on Twitter as a consequence of the larger use base, but those two weeks involved some of the most unhinged hype-posting I've seen in the decade I've been following HN.
AI bros can context switch to superconduction must faster than that.
Looks like they have observed what they can only explain as apparent superconductivity, but consistent with the Sagan principle are being rather cautious with how they report it.
You know what, one of the authors wrote pretty much the same elsewhere.
可以这样理解: 人类还没有仪器能测到理论严格意义上的迈斯纳, 所以加possible是出于对自然复杂性的敬畏. (Translation: It can be understood this way: humans do not yet have instruments that can measure Meissner in the strict sense of the theory, so adding possible is out of awe of the complexity of nature.)
Well, it's an Arxiv paper. Arxiv is perhaps not the best environment for clickbait headlines.
250K is -23C, or -9F, I.e. like a cold winter day. That’s really almost room temperature!
Compared with the working temperature of NMR magnets (4K)[1], it _is_ room temperature! It's not STP (standard temperature and pressure, 0C/1atm), yet, but maybe soon!
[1] https://www.indstate.edu/cas/chem_phys/filling-nmr-magnet
It's not STP (standard temperature and pressure, 0C/1atm
Nit: STP is 20C/1atm, not 0C/1atm.
Nit's nit: depends on the defining body, IUPAC is 0C, NIST is 20C (as per wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_temperature_and_press...
On a planet undergoing global warming.
While it's a lot for the planet as a whole, 2 or so degrees is trivial in these contexts. This discovery would raise the available temperature range of high temperature superconductors by 157 degrees K.
It depends on where you live.
Texas disagrees that -9 F is almost room temperature, though my freezers get that cold sometimes.
The fact that you have a relatively cheap, small and efficient device in your home that reaches that temperature is what makes -9F significant.
Anyone feel this is going in circles?
To a non chemist it may look like it’s going in circles. When you’re not solving a bug and writing debug statements and throwing paint at the wall it looks like you’re going in circles. Everything is going in circles until it isn’t. Be optimistic!
Exactly, just a long problem-solving loop.
I wish there was a journal that only published experiments that have been replicated. That would save so much time for many of us who want to know what is, and not what's being tried.
Replication is great but it’s not the only way science learns and it would be foolish to put that kind of limit on publishing your work.
That's what functioning science looks like. Giving up the first time round is a sure-fire way to guarantee that RTP superconductors are never found. How many non-functioning light bulbs did Edison invent before he made the one that worked?
...and without any resistance! (sorry, could not stop myself)
That sentiment is a normal side effect of having exposure to the research process (because stuff is being published) instead of just the outcome.
Also, remember that this just needs to work once for our world to completely change!
1. Here we go again, right?
2. Is this still a ceramic (therefore impossible to make into wires), right?
Stranded wire, yes. Rigid wire is possible. Think about it like iron plumbing or rigid electrical conduit.
I feel like we're just describing a narrow bus bar.
Isn't that approximately a wire?
Bars are a good guess, but the 3rd dimension should not matter. We could manufacture thin tile as the conductor, and PCB design would be done with superconducting Lego bricks.
Yes, it is a ceramic, but you CAN make cables out of it. Commonwealth Fusion Systems did, SuperOx sells them (they have deployed references), etc.
Second generation ceramic HTS is deposited in thin films on to flexible tapes:
https://www.superpower-inc.com/Technology.aspx
(scroll down for image of tape bending):
https://www.fujikura.co.jp/eng/newsrelease/products/2061942_...
Ice broke last year … this may not be the one, nor maybe the next dozen materials but seems like we are on the right glide path now.
<crosses fingers>
seems like we are on the right glide path now
In what sense? Public interest? LK-99 wasn't an incremental step toward room temp superconductivity, was it?
> In what sense? Public interest? LK-99 wasn't an incremental step toward room temp superconductivity, was it?
It was an incremental step toward this material. It also had some interesting properties at higher temperatures even if superconductivity wasn't one of them. It seemed really strange to me that LK99 was tossed aside so quickly. It got discredited faster than cold fusion, which is still lingering today under different names BTW.
It was an incremental step toward this material.
Could you please explain how?
this material is very similar to lk99, nobody would be studying it if not for the lk99 hubbub
Public interest and popularity are not bad though. Raised interest, more funding etc. can all be good things and accelerate this research.
I'm not saying it is, but I wouldn't say that previously we weren't on the right path to that discovery and now, thanks to public interest, we are.
Wasn’t LK-99 a copper doped lead apatite? Is this different?
This is a derivative, with slightly different chemical formula (namely, this includes sulfur, while LK-99 didn't).
Though the original, supposedly superconducting LK-99 sample, was produced in a way that caused it to be contaminated with sulfur. So this might be why their sample acted the way it did.
If I am understanding correctly, this 'hysteresis' effect could also be caused by tiny bits of iron contamination in the sample?
Simple answer: no. Ferromagnetic hysteresis increases with temperature, and the hysteresis here is stronger at lower temperatures. The amount of hysteresis they see at low temperatures is also too much to explain with undetected contamination. Plus, the scientists posted a picture of them fully floating a sample upside-down, which is pretty hard to explain away.
Complex answer: Maybe. Copper sulfide does a lot of weird things, and it's very easy to screw with ferromagnetism in unexpected ways. It's totally possible there's a lot of iron in this sample, and the huge incentive for room temperature superconductors is a powerful temptation to slant your data... or fabricate it entirely: https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
That's my alma mater :(
I want to believe. I really do.
Great to see research continuing on this particular path.
Until Anton Petrov does a video on this it isn't real.
What encourages me on this is that we just need a single instance to pan out. Just one. And I get the sense that we’re getting closer each year.
Counterpoint: Imagine this line of inquiry that the west has given up on lands China the breakthrough of the century? Given the way the US and EU are conspiring to withhold key chip fab tech, it would be absolutely hilarious if China covertly discovered room temperature superconductivity and the government withholds it as a domestic advantage; blowing away AWS and Microsoft's compute offering with something orders of magnitudes faster and reverse the tech playing field.
I am really relaxed about the US primacy in tech. It has all the systemic advantages and no fluke discovery would change that.
I am also quite relaxed about this preprint. As far as I am concerned the issues pointed out in this post on an actual physics forums with regards to the famous LK-99 preprint still stand with regards to this new paper:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/room-temperature-super...
I wasn't talking specifically about this paper. If there's some merit to this line of inquiry, and it yields something revolutionary, I think the Chinese government would be foolish not to turn it into leverage. Especially given the recent adversarial climate in trade relations and access to advanced equipment
Any technology will have a very long way from the initial discovery to widespread application. A swarm of tinkering US startups will beat any Chinese megaproject. You propose that it is developed covertly to such an extend that it becomes a game changer that disrupts the current power balance before the US realises. I strongly disbelieve that such things can happen outside of fiction. For example, Manhattan project was known to the Soviets very early.
You could be right, but it's hard to know how history would play out if a 'new cold war' with China started today, and with such a unique technological asymmetry (as room temperature superconductivity), and with a country that has a great deal more technical capability, self-sufficiency, and scruples than the former USSR.
The thing that brings China all those boons is that they make and sell things to the rest of the world.
Absent free trade, their advantages dwindle.
So the current "just shy of declared adversarial relationships" is optimum for them. Pushed further, say by retaining exclusive access to a game changing technology, and they start losing trade relationships (arguably, already have as manufacturing reallocated to SE Asia).
The trade war between the US and China (and the precipitating outcones) were instigated by the US. The withholding of ASML lithography equipment is a case in point.
That said, in spite of tarrifs from the west, China still has plenty of skin in the game, and the hypothetical suggests that trade would still be open enough for China to profit
>The trade war between the US and China (and the precipitating outcones) were instigated by the US.
That's very arguable when it was the US who led the world in opening up to China in the 90s/early 2000s, opening its markets to China, bringing China into the WTO, etc. (all at great cost to middle class Americans). China was an economic basket case and incapable of developing on its own. No country in history has been more generous to another.
And what did the US get in return? Currency manipulation, large scale economic espionage and mercantilist behavior, protectionism of Chinese markets and industries, fentanyl, militarization of South China Sea and bullying the countries there, largest and fastest military buildup since 1930s Germany, supporting Russia vs Ukraine, threatening war over Taiwan, etc. "Unrestricted warfare".
The US didn't cause China to do any of that, that was all the CCP's decision. Responses like economic derisking/decoupling (aka trade war) are completely legitimate and unsurprising.
This is hilarious revisionism. We didn't do any of that out of generosity, we did it for profit. We saw a huge pool of cheap labor and decided we wanted to let our companies exploit that. We rubbed our hands together and grinned while selling them the proverbial rope.
Absent free trade, China still has all the experience and expertise they have acquired up until now.
To sell to whom?
Afaik, their domestic middle class market isn't nearby big enough to singlehandedly fuel their economy.
And they'll economically-politically run up against the "middle class wants things like political power and freedom" if they try to balloon that class too quickly.
Startups dont do massive infrastructure investment. The Manhattan project was not a startup, but one of the most expensive things the US government ever did.
China has one big advance over the US. A government willing to throw unlimited funds and specific science or engineering problems.
To get that kind of commitment you the strong backing of senators from a dozen different states. It rarely happens in non military projects, and when it does it's a boondoggle. Look to the SLS project, $12 billion spent to recycle space shuttle engines from the 70s and 80s.
And do they actually solve more science or engineering problems than US?
I'd argue it helps them more with engineering and manufacturing/building problems than science ones.
The latter, under any government type, don't have a great track record of massive government investment accelerating progress.
Proof of concept level grants, sure! But it doesn't seem to scale past that. IMHO, a free market is a better GTM-stage+ capital allocator.
It's worth noting that, at least on the electronics manufacturing side (which is indeed what we're talking about here) the undeniable success story of TSMC was very much a government-led capital structure from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History
Government can often be a failure-prone capital allocator, but it can also result in improved alignment when an entire industry with wide socioeconomic implications is about to be born.
If you count émigrés, hell yes.
Not yet but the US has a big head start. The gap is closing every day.
"Resting on your laurels" always ends badly.
Then let's take full advantage of them. We must remain extremely hungry for science/tech progress/breakthroughs or we will eventually get run over.
And history is littered with examples of technological disruption ending empires
Fundamentally, we are not an empire - we are a republic. Feel like that has gotten lost in the noise recently.
Name some examples.
The number one most systemic difference going forward is population. China already has hundreds of millions living the equivalent of a middle-class US lifestyle. That is a massive prosperous population to draw scientists, etc. from.
It's an interesting thought experiment. I can entertain the idea of a superconductor staying a secret in a military environment, but I can't imagine it getting widescale commercial use and staying a secret.
Sure I think the idea fanciful, and I agree that keeping the tech from leaking would be close to impossible, but if the stakes were high enough, maybe a centrally governed and authoritarian government like China could pull it off. It's at least fun to think about.
In this movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
a researcher builds a device that can record and play back experiences which takes up most of a room, in a meeting with his boss, he receives some secret microchips made of a room temperature superconductor that he uses to make headsets.
Thank you for that. I had never encountered this film. I think parallels could also be drawn to the (highly underrated) Counterpart Series, where a researcher in Berlin accidentally creates a portal to a parallel earth and a cold war between the two world ensues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
Thank you. I was never able to find this again. Really enjoyed it!
I only just got around to watching Brainstorm sometime last year. It's far from a perfect movie, but definitely worth watching.
My understanding is that while you can reverse engineer something like a new material via trial and effort plus some basic lab analysis of samples.....stuff like chips are a PITA to reverse engineer.
My understanding is that a major hurdle is just how tiny everything is on modern chiplets. If I remember right....someone managed to reverse engineer the Intel 8086 or the 8080....but my understanding is that our lithography is so complex at this point you can't accurately reverse engineer the physical chip layout. If one could reverse engineer the physical layout and chemical layers...you could probably use that information to reverse engineer the photolithography mask and chemical etching step.
TLDR: we can't reverse those modern server CPU's ....we can only learn via what the fan or the chiplet owner be it Intel or and or apple decides to release regarding architecture or chip layout.
Back when I worked at TI we had a neat machine that used X-Rays to map and reverse competitor chips (mostly to discover they were duping ours). It would work down to just short of a 10nm resolution.
You'd need to use gamma spectrography to map out more modern chips. I'm sure someone's got the equipment somewhere; the chip manufacturers themselves must verify they got a good etch somehow.
If China discovers this, publishes papers on it, and patents it, you can be 100% sure that the west will just ignore any patents and fabricate it themselves.
Keyword was 'covertly'. As in withheld from publication and controlled by the government
Possible, but many of the economic benefits would be lost if you needed to do it covertly.
Can't exactly have room temperature superconducting monorails all over the nation without someone questioning exactly how you have room temp superconductors and nobody else does...
I’m fancying that a centrally managed economy might be able to do this, where a democratic capitalist economy may not. But I agree it’s a bit of a leap
As someone whose every move is monitored by some of the most well-funded, best-equipped, and ethically questionable intelligence agencies his tax money can buy, I look forward to seeing how long they can keep this secret.
I was making subtle reference to ASML withholding lithography machines from China. One could ask why China is yet to replicate their technology if know-how is so permeable
It doesn't need to be secret, just obscure. Don't believe the intelligence agencies are always intelligent or always there to help you or their host countries. Shin bet and their mishandling of Rabin and the recent October attacks prove this, as well as the CIA's pointless declassified wastes of money, often against American interests.
You assume the US and EU would be starting at zero.
It's a hypothetical I haven't really ruminated on. But I suppose it would be a new cold war scenario with superconductivity supremacy swapped out for nuclear first-strike capability, and similar levels of espionage
One would imagine that the west would then engage in China's favorite playing field leveler: they'd steal the technology by whatever means necessary.
Probably. But you have to wonder if anything can be stolen and replicated, why haven’t China managed to duplicate ASML’s lithographic machines?
I wonder how can you effectively withhold it? If you make commercial products with it and sell them it’s going to be reverse-engineered.
It’s only viable if it’s exclusively used in military tech.
You could offer a compute platform as a service. But I agree the applicability of the tech is probably broader than that.
Just send Clint Eastwood in to steal it
Even if you had a room temp SC manufacturing chips out of it would be a whole different issue. In fact we already have a material that can be used to build chips that can be clocked a couple OOM higher than silicon. It's just graphite. But even with a well known material like that and decades to try, the manufacturing capability still isn't there.
Agree with your overall point, though.
Seeing China Watcher Cope and Seethe for entire year is enough for me
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me- can't get fooled again.
I laughed quite a bit at this