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In late July, a couple of startling papers appeared on the arXiv, a repository of pre-peer-review manuscripts on topics in physics and astronomy. The papers claim to describe the synthesis of a material that is not only able to superconduct above room temperature, but also above the boiling point of water. And it does so at normal atmospheric pressures.
Instead of having to build upon years of work with exotic materials that only work under extreme conditions, the papers seem to describe a material that could be made via some relatively straightforward chemistry and would work if you set it on your desk. It was like finding a shortcut to a material that would revolutionize society.
The perfect time to write an article on those results would be when they’ve been confirmed by multiple labs. But these are not perfect times. Instead, rumors seem to be flying daily about possible confirmation, confusing and contradictory results, and informed discussions of why this material either should or shouldn’t work.
In this article, we’ll explain where things stand and why getting to a place of clarity will be challenging, even if these claims are right.
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I thought this was an interesting read for anyone frustrated by the ambiguity and unconfirmed speculation surrounding this story lately.
The comments on ars are typically worth reading, FYI - they aren’t trash and often provide interesting discussion and useful context.
So, of I understand correctly, just because one, five, or ten reports of LK-99 lacking superconductivity doesn’t mean that lk-99 can’t be a room temperature superconductor, the issue is that there isn’t a lot known about why it’s superconductive and the specific configuration of atoms required to express superconductivity under ambient temperature and pressure. The process for creating it isn’t an exact process and as a result, it’s hard to control and ensure that the final structure is correct.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Edit: this also makes me wonder (as a non-scientist) if most conductors could be superconductive at room temperature with the correct atomic structure, but due to technological limitations and a general lack of understanding, scientists are having to brute-force superconductivity via extreme pressures and/or temperatures. Hopefully, however, even if this is shown to be too difficult to be consistently replicated, it’ll lead to the discovery of more easily replicated materials.
Superconductors work because there is one state shared by a bunch of electrons separated by an energy gap from other states they could be in. To put thermal energy into an atom (ie. Resistance), you have to have a big enough shift in energy for all of the electrons to shift out of the state. Kind of like they unionized and you can’t give one a pay cut on its own. One way to achieve this is to make a regular material very, very, very cold. Lots of conductors will work, but only at or below liquid helium temperatures. Another way is to find a material where there are only a few ways for electrons to move around and cool it down or squeeze it until there’s only one. The latter works at hundreds to thousands of times higher temperature (tens of kelvin rather than millikelvin), but still really cold.
Conductors have a lot of states electrons can be in. It’s very easy to get one moving, but as they play pachinko through the atomic lattice they exchange tiny amounts of energy with each other and the rest of the material. Probably not a good candidate unless you’re really good at squeezing.
In some ways a high temperature superconductor is more like an insulator or a semiconductor than a regular conductor.
This new material is kinda weird in a few ways. For one, the main mechanism of traditional superconductors making all electrons “the same” so they have that grouping up effect is probably not present according to some very preliminary simulations (cooper pairs). Another is that the effect is limited to movement in one direction.
There’s 40 years of history and politics behind the theory, 30 years of experiments behind the leak from the korean project, and the material is very finnicky.
My understanding is similar. From what I gather, the theoretical understanding of why superconductivity happens is weak at best - so most (all?) superconductors are found by brute force, accident, or modifications to existing superconductors.
It’ll be an interesting middle-ground if this is shown to be superconducting in some configurations, but if it ends up not being reliable to manufacture on industrial scales. If it is confirmed, though, I expect ridiculous amounts of money would be thrown at the problem…
Absolutely, I’d imagine a lot of money in superconductors right now is speculative, in the sense that most of it is academic funding because any real breakthroughs are thought to be far enough in the future to not be of immediate value. Or to put it another way, I’d imagine it’s not getting as much funding as it should due to modern capitalism being short-sighted. If this turns out to be successful, albiet inconsistent, it’ll suddenly be in range for corporate “money vision” to focus on it.
Edit: I’d imagine the US military will be especially interested in it, which would further assist in development. Since the research is unclassified, it means every decent-sized military will likely be competing in an arms-race behind closed doors to see who’ll be able to adopt it first, because they can all use said research as a stepping stone.
I think it’s fair to say that basic science in general is underfunded and adding to that academic overhead is absurd.
That said, it’s useful to clarify some definitions in there. Basic science is anything but basic, it’s “pure research”, or projects that aim to better understand some principle and/or phenomenon (a relevant example would be the mechanisms behind superconductors).
That and the academic overhead I’m referencing is the cut that a university takes of grant awards. Most of the departments I’ve been around take 50% of the grant award, so if you need $100,000 to complete a project, you have to ask for 200 grand (or more if you want to be paid the whole year rather than just 9 months). Now a lot of this is driven by an outrageous number of administrators with insulting salaries for what they provide (does the vice president of insert some nebulous term here really provide 300 grand worth of contributions to a university, especially so when they set the salary of teaching faculty down around 40~50K and expect applicants with PhDs and years of experience).
So what ends up happening is that researchers tag buzzwords and trendy bells and whistles onto research projects that really don’t need them just to have a single digit percent chance at getting the finding to make them happen. Oh and if they don’t beat the odds, they are shown the door in 5 years. Academia really needs a shakeup.
That and the academic overhead I’m referencing is the cut that a university takes of grant awards. Most of the departments I’ve been around take 50% of the grant award, so if you need $100,000 to complete a project, you have to ask for 200 grand (or more if you want to be paid the whole year rather than just 9 months).
Jesus Christ, why do they need 50%? I could understand 20%, or 30%, but 50%!?
Now a lot of this is driven by an outrageous number of administrators with insulting salaries for what they provide (does the vice president of insert some nebulous term here really provide 300 grand worth of contributions to a university, especially so when they set the salary of teaching faculty down around 40~50K and expect applicants with PhDs and years of experience).
I thought that while PhD candidates were poorly paid, most professors with actual PhDs tended to start around 70k~100k depending on the school. Do you have any links to articles that talk about professor salaries? Additionally, I’d be willing to accept the VP of a university making $300k if the professors were making at least $150k (around half of what the VP makes), however that’s not the case.
I can directly verify this based on my career. I’m not really trying to dox myself, but at a large state university in Ohio (not OSU) PhD candidates in chemistry were paid 22k a year for their teaching positions. I was offered the academic lab manager position (I held the interim title a few times while finishing my PhD) which is a PhD wanted, masters minimum position at 29k. Nontenured teaching faculty started in the high 30s to mid 40s depending on experience. Fresh tenure track hires came in at 60k with little wiggle room. Because these are state schools, all of these salaries are released to the public. Pick a university and find a prof or admin you’d like to know about and plug them in here. https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/data/higher_ed_salary
Wow. That’s horrible. I’ll have to spend a bit more time looking at the salary link because I can’t find a way to filter out non-teaching roles and I’m seeing salaries all over the place (both professor and non-professor), but it sucks that you’ve had to deal with that.
Oh it worked out fine for me in the end, I’m making 6 figures for a government agency. It’s the adjuncts that got screwed the worst, they had no promise of consistent work and landed I think 3 grand per class per semester with no benefits.
The authors have now refuted their own claim
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