Indeed, this will change pretty much everything if true. A true room temperature / ambient pressure superconductor will cause a revolution in so many fields that I find it hard to believe. But if... Let's wait for replication before throwing a party. This is on par with the discovery of the transistor and possibly bigger.
Superconductors have a current limit above which they are no longer superconductors. It is possible that a room temperature superconductor could be created that has a limit too low to be of any practical use.
It seems this is worth cautious excitement, but don't get too excited yet.
Oof, all right then. Perhaps there's room for improvement, but there would need to be a lot before this is useful/competitive even in lab settings.
For comparison, high temperature superconductors (in this context high temperature means tens of degrees kelvin) like the recently rather revolutionary ReBCO has critical current values measured in hundreds of thousands of amps per square centimeter. That would be a factor of a million.
It's a thin film according to the article linked, but there is no mention of how thin it is (it could be a monolayer) and there is no mention of how wide the film was so the 250 mA figure can not be used to determine whether or not there is 'room for improvement' or even a necessity for that (unless it was already normalized, for which I see no evidence). The 'Critical current' isn't mentioned at all in terms of the cross section of the conductor, just as a function of temperature and magnetic flux which they really should have provided to be able to make sense of the figure. ReBCO is 8 MA / cm^2 (that's million, not milli), the thin film layer they tested with could well be so thin that it is in the same ballpark or it could be a small fraction.
This is clearly a very early result and until they have more insight into how it works (assuming it really works...) we'll have to be patient before we get more meaningful figures on the actual current carrying capacity of thicker conductors made out of this stuff. They were happy enough to be able to prove superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure, clearly they are still a ways away from being able to line up a comparison with ReBCO with respect to current density. But surely that will happen soon if this is real.
If it is a thin film it may have to be a thin film to get the effect in which case you still need a million of them bundled together to get comparable currents. It's not a certainty but a fact that dials back the excitement of this announcement from potentially world changing to interesting but quite limited applications.
>In 2008, Gozar et al. reported hightemperature interface superconductivity between metallic and insulating copper oxides(39). The
thinner the layer, the greater the stress-inducing effect, the greater the strain, which seems to be the higher the superconducting transition temperature. Therefore, we argue that the stress caused
by temperature and pressure brings a minute structural distortion and strain, which create an electronic state for superconductivity.
So the paper seems to confirm this, though the authors seem to be hopeful for general applications.
What we have here seems to be a clever trick to have ambient pressure superconductors by introducing crystal structure/microstructure stresses.
>But surely that will happen soon if this is real.
What I'm saying it that this is not so sure, may not be possible for a bulk material, may be insanely too expensive to be useful otherwise, and may be limited to very niche applications where milliamp superconductors might be useful (think sensors, microchips, and the like)
Sure is cool, but at the same time... cool your jets, eh?
Absolutely, but layers can be stacked (if they really are superconducting there won't be much of an issue to get rid of waste heat, there will be very little of that).
As for cooling my jets: I don't think we'll see any real application of this in the next 10 years at a minimum, this stuff is the first step on a very long road towards commercialization. From the first mention of the photo electric effect (~1890) to practical (1956), affordable (1990's) solar panels took roughly a century.
I hope that this superconductor, assuming it's real can be fast tracked given our much improved knowledge of materials and fabrication methods. But I'm realistic enough to realize how much work would still have to be done even if it is real. The road from the lab to the shelf is a long and expensive one and even in the best of scenarios I can't imagine anything on a timescale of less than a decade.
Let's wait to see what the maximum number of A/cm^2 is before determining if that is even necessary.
It's possible that they already normalized the figure, and if that's the case then 125 mA/cm^2 would be 'bad news' in the sense that even though the temperature and pressure are much better than other superconductors the critical current is much, much worse. But given the way the paper is formulated I'm not sure if that is a proper reading and it is very well possible that they are talking about a particular thin film sample (which would make it a small fraction of a square centimeter in cross section) and how much current they passed through that sample. In which case the situation would be much better already, especially if it turns out that the sample was extremely thin and/or narrow.
> I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
It's on arXiv, which is a preprint journal, which means it has no peer-review; and is therefore generally less trustworthy (especially when the paper has no connection to a technical conference or is not being published elsewhere, and is in a non-computer science or mathematics field).
In addition to this, claims of room-temperature superconductors have been mired in controversy or otherwise proven false:
Considering that many fraudulent claims of room-temperature superconductivity have gotten into Nature and other top-tier publications, I would wait for multiple independent recreations of the results in the paper.
AFAIK doesn't pyrolytic carbon need a N-S field in order to levitate? That's the one key difference I can see - this looks like the traditional superconductor trick of just levitating in a simple field.
But it still looks dependent on their being a NS pole at a corner.
That said...from this video https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n I'm very suspicious of the behavior you see in the last few seconds where it gets pushed over to the corner and seems to fall right to the magnet That would be consistent with their being a ring magnet underneath the top magnet their, and once suitably over into the corner it loses the diamagnetic property because there's no N-S pole. The "seam" on what should be a bulk magnet in both videos that are out seems like an obvious problem.
So yeah...I think put me down for this is diamagnetism with pyrolytic carbon (the image in the paper also notably hides what you see in the video - that there's a seam on the magnet where it looks like it's a stack of two).
The effect is weak, but seeing that it behaves the same by flipping the magnet means that it can't be a standard magnet like we're used to seeing. (If I understood some of the other comments correctly).
In the video, it's when they stop moving the magnet, it maintains its position, neither repelling nor attracting.
Several physicists have spoken up and said this, and a few other tells distinguishes it from any conventional materials, which is why they made the video to begin with I'm sure.
That said I'm just parroting back the things I've picked up from this discussion.
Unmoving copper also neither repels or attracts a magnet.
Eddy currents impede movement of non ferrous metals in a static magnetic field. This looks like slow motion falling or resistance to spinning when the metal is in a fixed field.
This is how auto belays work.
If you move the magnet, the metal will also move since you're inducing a current and the fields from the eddy currents will react against the moving magnet.
That said, I'm enough of a layman not to be able to connect this explanation to what I saw in the video.
Are you saying because it wasn't moving in "slow motion," we can rule out non-ferrous metals? Or are you saying the alternating movement/stillness of the magnet shows this?
As I've said, I'm fuzzy on the details, so I'm relying on the expertise of the physicists here.
I can tell it doesn't react to a magnet in ways that I'm familiar with (copper, iron, other magnets), but that's all the detail I can tell from the video.
It's also suspicious that there's not a control sample of copper in the video. Any scientist trying to be thorough would have controlled for this - shown that you don't get the same effect with just a copper sample as you do with a copper sample that's been coated.
Well after seeing the second video I'm pretty convinced it's superconductive or a good scam. The effect was probably just not strong enough in the first video.
I'm suspicious of the magnet. Take a real close look in the second video: the paper cuts the image so the seam of the magnet blends with the table. But in the video it looks much more obviously like there's two magnets stacked on top of each other.
Which is a weird thing to do when for superconductors you shouldn't need it, but for pyrolytic graphite levitation you would (to get an N-S pole).
They specifically act in a way to rule out fakes. For example they turn the magnet around to show that there are no small wires connecting the edges. They start and stop many times, they move in different directions. They knew the video would be watched with the default mind set that it is fake.
On reality, you would need a good computer with a large set of sound emitters just outside of the screen and a huge lot of tries. It would be a project for a small team and many months of work.
Or maybe a few transparent wires and less photoshop.
I do think the easiest way to fake a video like that would be to use a cool superconductor and change the atmosphere so nobody notices its temperature.
Complicated fakes wouldn't masquerade as scientific papers though. The FTL neutrino comes to mind, where it turned out to be a misconnected fiber optic cable - but everyone involved was genuine.
The bits and pieces of this certainly look like little are being genuine, so the new question is what non-obvious mistake could they be making?
It's my impression, and it seems to be the consensus here that it is very unlikely that this is a mistake. This is either very real or completely fabricated. You don't have a piece of ceramic keeping its distance to a magnet by some unexpected phenomenon or measurement error.
And given the easiness in reproducing the study, there doesn't seem to be any point in fabricating it.
The main worry is whether we're dealing with wholly rational actors. People convince themselves they're seeing an effect, and then seemingly completely erratic things to try and prove it on the conviction that with just a bit more effort they'll get it for real.
Like you'd question why someone would photoshop results[1] in a paper, because surely they'd have to realize they're fabricating data, but they go ahead and do it anyway.
The videos are convincing but are they of what they really purport to show? I agree - what would be the point of fabricating it. But weirder things have happened in the breadth of human experience.
This is very much the truth. The scariest founders during due diligence are the ones that are totally convincing, true believers and yet utterly wrong. They've even convinced themselves, but that failed to convince mother nature. It can be super hard to detect this.
I will say this, I haven't found the "it's not real" responses very compelling either. I've also found that people who actually work in the field seem less skeptical than knowledgeable people adjacent to the field. If it's not fraud, it's at least something new. Here are the reasons I've seen provided by adjacent folks:
Nonscientific objections:
* it was published in a low h-index journal (not a scientific objection)
* poor formatting, misspelled title (not a scientific objection)
* patented and has a company (not a scientific objection)
* seems too simple, it has to be more complex than that, how could we have missed that? (not a scientific objection, also rather ahistorical)
I consider all of these pretty irrelevant given that the authors are not no-names and the actual paper makes clear claims, does exactly what everyone says you should be able to do if you have a real superconductor (show a video of it floating!) and makes replication easy. If it's straight up fraud it will be easy to discover.
There were also many pseudoscientific objections raised by field-adjacent people that I found uncompelling, responses from people actually in the field in parentheses:
* The first video looks like normal copper, the second like other diamagnetic materials or is otherwise unconvincing (not evidence against it being superconducting, at least one materials science lab had several members look at it and thought it looked legit).
* They are trying to hide the magnet structure somehow (the video shows it in clear view).
* The wafer isn't fully levitating or the way it falls is suspicious (not really unexpected given that the superconductive part is supposed to be present in only a few percent of the material).
Scientific objections I find more compelling made by people more familiar with the field, but more bourne of natural skepticism than disqualifying, with there being a lot of subtlety:
* both effects shown can be achieved in known ways by non-superconducting materials (but at the same time? would at least be a major material science advance in that case as it would apparently require diamagnetism ~ 150x as strong as graphite. Author who mentioned this said it would be "materials science magic" and I'm not sure why you'd rather believe in this than superconductivity given that neither have ever been seen before and it's consistent with sueprconductivty. Unless it's straight up fraud).
* Mesner effect graph don't go exactly to zero / happen exactly where you'd expect, maybe reflects a measurement error? (apparently, given the small % of the material that's supposed to be superconducting and material distribution, this isn't really evidence either way. not like we have other room temperature superconductors to compare it to).
* no max temperature where superconductivity vanishes measured, so is it really superconducting? (standard measurement devices only go up to what they reported, scientists seem very mixed about whether it would be easy to DIY measurement at higher temperatures for such a small current)
* not a similar mechanism to known good past "high-temperature" superconductors, and proposed explanation doesn't really make sense given slight deviations in pressure compared to what is in this substance (other scientists seem to disagree and think there could be something there, but it would also not be the first time something novel was discovered and worked for reasons totally different than those the scientists initially imagined)
Overall I find the quality of the objections really weak which increases (to me) the chances that there is something novel here, even if it's not superconductivity. That or it's obvious fraud and we'll know in like three days.
The trouble with the shown videos is that with a limited perspective, they do look a lot like the sort of single-camera trick that a lot of "free energy" device videos use - e.g. [1]
Fortunately if we're dealing with a real effect, this will be easily replicated and proven. But with the fixed perspective of a video, you can create a large number of apparent effects that look real in the constraints of the video format.
The biggest point in favor is that there's full reproduction instructions. I am eagerly waiting someone to try and pull this together separately.
Where I get hung up is, it's an extraordinary, world-changing claim. The standard of proof is very high (and while I could get access to a kiln, I can't get access to high pressure vacuum vessel on short notice).
After reading some responses suggesting the authors don't understand how to measure superconductivity, I double checked the senior author's credentials. He is very much a legit scientist but seems to be a relative newcomer to superconducting. There is a long established history of respected and productive scientists entering fields they don't really know anything about and engaging in mild to moderate quackery. In this case, I am now fairly confident that the following is true:
* he and his team did discover a (probably) novel diamagnetic material.
* it may or may not have interesting properties
* however, it is not superconductive.
According to people who were able to more fully read the "real" paper, the key issue is that their measurements, if taken at face value (and not as due to, e.g., bad contacts with the material) suggest two contradictory things:
* the sample is extremely pure (due to the shape of the first graph).
* the sample has impurities causing it to not exhibit zero resistance, and not to exhibit "full" superconductive properties (i.e. having zero resistance under a magnetic field with increasing strength).
Additionally, since they were never able to measure Tc, they can't show the full Meissner effect as that requires heating up the sample to above its Tc first and then cooling it and flipping it, something you can't do with a diamagnet. By itself the fact that they didn't reach this temperature did not bother me, because I assumed that the senior authors were experts in superconductivity and had made sure that the material simultaneously exhibited other superconductive properties like zero resistance (or close enough when factoring in impurities). The fact that they were so focused on replication and the process was so simple made it unlikely to be fraud.
But, the fact that the first chart doesn't make sense unless the sample were completely pure, plus the lack of expertise they have with superconductors, indicates that it is much more likely measurement error on their parts, in which case it's not clear whether there's any evidence at all for superconductivity right now outside the diamagnetism. Given that there are many room temperature diamagnets known (albeit perhaps none as strong as this one?) and no room temperature superconductors known, this puts the odds that this isn't a superconductor at practically certain, IMO.
I mean sure, it would not be hard to fake this if it's a total fraud. It will also be discovered almost instantly so I don't find that case interesting. The more interesting question to me is, (1) are there glaring red flags indicating it's a fraud (no), and (2) if it's not a fraud, what are the odds that it's superconductivity? For me, seeing how weak the criticism is, I'm moderately higher on it actually being superconductivity than I was before, since alternative explanations also seem to require materials with novel properties.
Well normal copper does this in presence of a strong magnet. I don't think we are seeing superconductivity, just regular copper Meissner effect. Super conductive would frame lock the copper. right?
But it wouldn't lock the target in place when they stop, which is what this video demonstrates very well. The conductor would move towards the magnet and try to stick to it.
>The conductor would move towards the magnet and try to stick to it.
No, only ferromagnetic material would behave like that. Copper foil will also move in a moving magnetic field, and won't be attracted to a stationary magnet.
I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!