Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99 (opens in new tab)

I know mercury gauges use to have a 0 to 30 scale sometimes (not 0 to -30), and that was confusing!

Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect.

That’s my understanding anyway.

However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.

ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition temperature decreases. That's pretty huge. Unless this paper is fraudulent, I take this as the biggest positive evidence so far that something besides simple diamagnetism is going on. And, cards on table, with the assumption that the paper is not fraudulent, this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.

First it shows a temperature graph vs moment, as they heat it it loses the diamagnetism around the temperature LK99 is said to be superconducting.

Second only a superconductor will have net-zero field, which means "stable" levitation. In the video they approach the sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly "in place". A regular diamagnet generates a external field that "follows" the field applied so it would likely move sideways, that is why to "levitate in place" a diamagnet people normally use a Halbach array.

EDIT: A Halback array is made alternating the poles N-S of the magnet, so that forces of repulsion created by the diamagnet cancel. This is why you will see people using multiple magnets when levitating pyrolytic graphite.

Also, turning the magnet upside down seems useful. And then, heating up to show that it drops at a certain temperature. I wonder what would be needed in this case; I guess less than 100° C.

In any case, the "show" part is important. Good video quality is important.

I used to be a particle physicist, and some of the more complex systems were just those used to cool the superconducting magnets down to cold enough that they become superconducting. If you can do that at ambient temp, you don't have to bother with that entire system.

Also: fusion reactors rely on superconducting magnets (or if you are JET live with the fact that you can only run your magnets for a few seconds before the overheat), so can have a large impact on future fusion reactors.

With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and any sudden changes in morphology can be biopsied. The learning would be revolutionary for medical science as well- right now we have so little data on what kinds of benign growths people have that our best method for figuring out if a mass is a problem is asking if there are any other symptoms. Not to mention entirely new kinds of medical devices would be possible, eg using SQUIDs.

Ground-imaging MRI would also be revolutionized. Archeology, paleontology, geology, mapping resources and finding minerals would experience a quantum leap. You would be able to drive a car through the desert and spot fossils or faults or mineral signatures.

Space travel would become essentially free with the use of launch loops. Which would also make long-distance travel incredibly cheap and practically pollution-free. You would need electricity alone to reach low earth orbit, or to accelerate planes to multiples of the speed of sound.

Grid-level storage, peaker plants and load-following would become nearly obsolete. Superconducting catenaries would connect every nation on earth. Normally plants have to turn off when everyone goes to sleep; now factories in China can be powered by US fission. Canadian homes could be kept warm by Australian solar. HVDC interlinks would be obsolete. We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely.

CPUs could be anywhere from 10% to 50% more efficient. GPUs even more so. Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.

- higher efficiency turbines and solar panels - more clean energy for the same investment

- fusion?

- low-energy computing at higher performance, as we learned recently LLMs so far can't take advantage of hitherto zero marginal cost of software anymore

- democratization of advanced quantum computing?

It's all very exciting and in a truly replicable and industrially-feasible scenario I'm starting to feel this could be another 1960s kind of rate of change. One can dream, no? Maybe we can finally get rid of all the doom & gloom stories we tell ourselves and actually do something with these unexpected presents of our times? Think smartness instead of ignorance, (old) Star Trek instead of the latest Fallout fantasy on the horizon? Why not?

These and many more consequential innovations might develop just in time, as climate change is coming at us much faster than we are willing to admit (don't look up).

That said, even with all of that (including fusion) we will still need to cut our co2 emissions; drastically change our lifestyles / minimize consumption and deal with already locked in impacts hitting us sooner than later.

Enthusiastic midnight edit:

Also what's up with graphene based ICs and optical computing advancements? Competition of new old ideas finally come to be realized? What's next? I want a new breed of superconductor enabled Lisp Machines by 2030! Why not home brew "3D print" the whole thing? That should be the ultimate target here! The handling of "open source" lead would probably suck though %D.

I guess Alan Kay wouldn't be enthused by such a Lisp Machine renaissance in principle yet still stand with his "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" credo.

Let's predict a future for a planet that shifts back into balance!

All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning.

Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would enable.

And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build but can’t because of permitting reasons would have zero energy loss if we actually built them, which we won’t.

* devices that currently use superconductors don't have to use cooling anymore, and so become much cheaper to build and operate (MRI machines, certain sensors, high-power magnets for things like fusion research, big generators, big motors). This is a pretty solid bet.

* devices where superconductors would be an improvement, but currently don't make economic or practical sense. These are almost certain to crop up, but which ones will pan out is IMHO very speculative.

In the latter category, things like computing chips, more sensors, certain art works (sculptures with permanently levitating parts, how awesome!), smaller motors and generators seem plausible.

But there is likely whole categories of things we haven't thought of that could benefit from either zero resistance or rejecting magnetic fields.

So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.

It seems to me they were just in the process of constructing a convincing paper, which included convincing tests and could have been acompanied by sending out samples to independent labs. Then they were essentially forced to put out what they had, which made their claims even more unconvincing.

[...]

> Danijel Djurek, a physicist at A. Volta Applied Ceramics in Zagreb, Croatia, claims that he discovered his superconducting ceramic mixture in the late 1980s. But he was unable to pin down the structure and formula of the material, and his research was interrupted by years of war, following Croatia's split from Yugoslavia.

excerpts from http://www.rexresearch.com/djurek/djurek.htm

And this suggests that they were conflicted for some reason about publishing, likely commercially so (as evidenced about the patent). Maybe they were trying to create a product with it that they could sell before others could replicate the material.

So the rogue employee does absolutely deserve credit for bringing this thing into the world and humanity should not stigmatize them for doing so; perhaps we should do exactly the opposite.

edit:

KR20210062550A - Mehtod of manufacturing ceramic composite with low resistance including superconductors and the composite thereof -

https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en

Accept it happened and make amends and make those things very public and move forward to making an official announcement together with the so called 'rogue' author (in my opinion he did the world a favour).

Everyone's assuming it's about the Nobel, but it is much more likely it's about far more lucrative goals.

But the rogue scientist wanted to share it with the entire world.

It would make for a nice movie.

Fiat lux!

.. by way of Back to the Future hoverboards.

Young researchers in China often face intense competition and pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe, the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They must continuously chase after every potential scientific breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity, but as a necessary step for survival in their career.

Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants, and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among young researchers.

some possibilities:

- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later.

- they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about

- they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of interaction

- fear of getting it wrong.

This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality papers rush in after every major release and announcement in order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.

Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.

Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish this sort of half assed analysis.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1cY4y1y7ZM

Translation of the title: If room temperature superconductivity is really repeated, I will eat shit

Then this topic became hot in bilibili. Currently the first LK-99 replication video reaches nearly 10 million views.

Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.

I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion

* https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687288889717989376

* https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz/status/1687051547337781248

I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.

USTC is the second best university in the world in chemistry research according to Nature. [0]

[0] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...

Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier is.

I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Boys

Especially: "On the Production, Properties, and some suggested Uses of the Finest Threads." 1887

https://zenodo.org/record/1431517/files/article.pdf

This is a very entertaining read, and highly recommended.

He produced extremely fine threads of glass, quartz, etc. finer than the visible light diffraction limit. (Which he would use to construct sensitive torsion balances)

He was inspired by Peles Hair. (Volcanoes grow hair too...). He first describes electro-spinning and its limitations (uncontrolled growth of hair which mattes together).

How did he do it? He used a miniature crossbow, modified so he could trigger it by foot pedal, leaving his hands free to work.

He would first produce a small thin section by more conventional means, glue one end to a fine dart or arrow (a piece of straw really).

In the next sentence "blowpipe" is not a launching device, but a device to heat a small sample to a high temperature.

Then he would use a blowpipe and melt the piece of say quartz until a bead forms, at which point he would trigger the cross bow.

As the arrow of straw shot away it draws the bead of melt to a long fine thread.

Perhaps this can be modernized to vacuum or inert atmosphere, melt the quasi LK-99 sample until it beads, then shoot away. Rewind the resulting thread and re-anneal any non-superconductive segments.

So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"

Advanced tech like MRI machines, maglev trains, and quantum computers all use superconductivity now, but are enormously bulky and expensive because they require extreme cooling using liquid helium (which is in short supply). Room temperature super conductors can dispense with all that, so instead of a quantum computer being the size and power draw of a refrigerator (because it is in fact mostly refrigerator) it could go in your wristwatch.

Superconductors also expel magnetic fields, which in practical terms means they repel magnets. And they only repel, without being attracted to magnets at all, like iron or the poles of other magnets. So you can use them for levitation. And because superconductors have zero resistance, if you put energy into a superconducting coil it stays there forever, just circling round and round the coil.

This LK-99 material people are talking about is an alloy of lead and copper, and it's not that difficult or expensive to make. The raw materials are fairly cheap, and the production involves heating it to hundreds of degrees centigrade for 24-48 hours, which is very easy to do in a lab and probably easy to do at industrial scale. Scientists don't understand the material very well yet, but if these discoveries are validated (as appears to be happening right now), then refining the manufacturing process is going to happen quite quickly because the payoffs and economic demand will be enormous.

People are comparing this to the invention of the transistor; I think a better comparison is the electrical lightbulb. It's going to change things massively, because any country will be able to manufacture this. You could manufacture this stuff at home, the equipment you need fits on a desk and costs only a few thousand $.

Robots and exoskeletons come to mind.

One of the more bonkers applications would be to wrap Mars around the equator with it, creating an artificial magnetosphere.

Temperatures on Mars are pretty low, but during the Martian summer they get to a nice 20°C there, so currently available superconductors are not up to the task.

This happens to lots of famous scientists/engineers (Sergey Korolev, Vladimir Vernadsky, ...). We can do a bit better.

> It is not advisable to borrow money and come to people who do business with difficulty and be organised and do tyranny," he said.

Maybe he is frustrated with the verification process?

If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires.

But more likely the issue is that their current method has lots of room for improvement and someone else finds one that is substantially better.

ETA: apparently wrong, can patent composition of very novel materials.

If it's literally a room-temperature superconductor, the present state of the law is irrelevant. China won't play by the rules. If Korea tries to corner it in the West, the rules will be replaced. (This would have been true had the inventor been French or American, too.)

Superconduction at room temp would all for less current consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips, letting them run cooler and faster.

MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much smaller and more efficient MRI.

If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.

If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could be avoided.

Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.

The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.

Depending on those results determines the range of applications it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some experience in making those be useful via making them into a tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!

There's a timeline where all of these questions end up favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of day to day applications - we might find out that with one small trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy production methods. There's a world where all these answers aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in specialized applications (which are still huge for science and humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over another few decades.

I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have to actually productize things using it, etc.

Typically you measure resistance that small like this:

     +<-------sample------>-
     ---------p    p--------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_source

As long as the blue line doesn't cross the red one, I won't believe in it. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Wait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?

but we can control.

I a m talking out my butt - thus a toiroidal wrapp where by the torioidal spin in induced trough a mecury spinning magnetic slurry... as basically a spinned slurry ......

But that just me...

A fully pure sample would probably fully levitate. Given the rush to recreate and lack of purity, if a portion levitates (causing standing on one end) you could assume a pure sample would fully levitate.

But there could very well be indirect applications! This would be very very interesting for the physics community, and surely lead to other new things.

The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of purity- I think we'll learn quite a bit more if someone manages to get a bigger sample than a flake the size of the point of a needle.