Science

Get ready for the age of the superconductor (maybe)

View 4 Images
A pellet of LK-99, which was claimed to be the first ever room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor
Korea University
A pellet of LK-99, which was claimed to be the first ever room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor
Korea University
Current superconductors require extremely low temperatures
A room-temperature, ambient atmosphere superconductor could revolutionize transportation
A room-temperature, ambient-atmosphere superconductor could usher in a new computer age
View gallery - 4 images

Want a flying skateboard? Your own personal home fusion reactor? A wearable MRI scanner you can buy online? If a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconducting material really has been found, that is just the tip of the technological iceberg.

Recently, the internet has been abuzz with the news that a new superconducting material called LK-99, which retains its properties at room temperature and ambient atmospheric pressure, may have been developed by a team of researchers at Korea University.

Because there have been false alarms about this sort of discovery in the past, the announcement was met with widespread skepticism and, to date, no one has been able to verifiably replicate the research. That being said, what if it's true? What would be the implications of such a material? It turns out that we're talking about a fundamental technological revolution on the scale of the invention of the transistor or the dynamo.

What is a superconductor?

Current superconductors require extremely low temperatures

A superconductor is a material that takes on some really exotic properties. When the right conditions are reached, all electrical resistance in the material suddenly vanishes and it generates a magnetic field. What this means is that it can carry an electrical current with incredible efficiency and almost no loss of energy through heat. It can also generate powerful magnetic fields.

The practical applications of superconductors have been known for decades, but these have been hindered because most superconducting materials have to be cooled with liquid helium to near absolute zero. Needless to say, maintaining these cryogenic temperatures requires a lot of very complicated, expensive, bulky, and hard-to-manage mechanisms.

This is the reason why MRI scanners, which use superconducting magnets, are so massive and why the bill for an MRI scan can make your eyes bug out of your head like a Tex Avery cartoon character.

It's also the reason why experimental fusion reactors are gigantic and why pilot projects, like one in 2021 where Commonwealth Edison used superconductors for power lines in the Chicago north side, were abandoned even though they showed several orders of magnitudes of improvements.

This is true even with more advanced superconductors that work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. As for the few room-temperature superconductors, they only superconduct at pressures of 1.67 million atmospheres. Hardly practical.

But what about LK-99? If it really is a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, it would unshackle the technology and make it truly practical for a mind-boggling number of applications.

Energy storage, fusion power, floating buildings and the next computing revolution

A room-temperature, ambient atmosphere superconductor could revolutionize transportation

The most obvious thing is that it would revolutionize power generation and transmission. Power lines with zero resistance would carry 200 times more current than a copper wire, but with no heat or loss, over longer distances at much lower costs.

In addition to this, if a superconductor is made into a loop and a charge is run through it, that charge will run about in that loop indefinitely without loss. This means you can use the superconductor to store energy for later use, which would be a boon to the solar and wind power industries that suffer from being intermittent power sources that need a practical and economic way of storing energy when the wind doesn't blow and the Sun doesn't shine. It would also mean batteries that are lighter, charge faster, and have higher energy density.

The magnetic fields produced by such a superconductor hold the potential for fusion reactors to shrink by orders of magnitude. You might not get ones that power your car or light your home, but they'd be small enough and cheap enough to be commonplace and even portable. More importantly, energy shortages and worries about carbon emissions would be a thing of the past as humanity enjoys clean, limitless energy.

Superconductors would take magnetic levitation to a whole new level. Maglev trains would become much faster, more efficient, much cheaper to build, and more common. The technology would also trickle down until we see trams floating down the road, maybe even cars or hoverboards – even buildings that could use such levitating technology to maintain and actively support structures without the need for additional power to do so once charged.

Then there are propulsion systems. With lighter, more powerful batteries and more efficient and more powerful electric motors, all-electric planes and other air vehicles could be larger, faster, and have longer range. You could even see watercraft with magnetohydrodynamic jets to propel them quickly and silently.

A room-temperature, ambient-atmosphere superconductor could usher in a new computer age

Computers would also have the potential of being altered beyond recognition. CPUs could be built without the need for cooling systems or current leakages, making them faster and more efficient. Beyond that, the quantum computer could come into its own as qubits, which are the quantum computing equivalent to transistors, wouldn't need cryogenic support systems. Large numbers of qubits could be installed close together and linked by superfast digital connections. In a single jump, quantum computers could leap from the lab and become the 21st century's answer to the PC.

Superconductors could lead to sensor systems that are as sensitive as their cryogenic versions, even on the quantum level, but could be much smaller. Imagine MRI scanners and similar devices that could be worn by patients or bleeding-edge imaging systems that are as easy to use as phone cameras. Or space telescopes as sensitive as the James Webb but a fraction of the size and able to be mass produced.

Undreamt of possibilities

However, the most revolutionary applications will be the ones that haven't been imagined yet. Up until the 1980s, computers were so large, expensive, and hard to gain access to that you needed a PhD in Boolean logic to book time on one. This meant that even the leading computer scientists had very little hands-on experience with the machines and very little real understanding of what they did or could do. As a result, they simultaneously overestimated computers and underestimated them.

Then came the silicon chip and computers shrunk like my bank account at tax time. Computers went from the lab to the office and then the home. Millions of people used them every day and had the chance to simply play with them. Very soon, everyone from software engineers to school kids understood computers not as number crunchers, but as data processors, and that they weren't mechanical oracles, but very useful, albeit frustrating, idiots. Meanwhile computers evolved from discrete machines to components, filtering deep into our technology and our daily lives.

After that, the computer revolution exploded, giving us an increasing cascade of digital advances, including the internet, virtual libraries holding more knowledge than anything in human history, ChatGPT, the smartphone, social media, and cat memes.

The same may turn out to be true for room-temperature superconductors as they change our lives and become so much a part of it that we no longer notice them. But, as the cookbook says, first catch your rabbit. We still don't know if LK-99 works, is practical to manufacture, or if it's the latest in a long line of tantalizing dead ends.

Still, it doesn't hurt to dream.

View gallery - 4 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
11 comments
Chase
All the promises are cool, but my first question after "Is this vaporware?" is "Ok, what rare elements did you have to put into it?" In the same way that Li-Ion batteries initially seemed like a great thing with zero side effects, we've quickly figured out that a shortage of lithium kind of puts a damper on how awesome it can actually be.
ClauS
The enthusiasm of this article got a little out of control and started to add misleading if not straight false statements. For example statements like "fusion reactors to shrink by orders of magnitude" and "space telescopes as sensitive as the James Webb but a fraction of the size" are missing the fact that current fusion reactors are actually using superconducting electromagnets, and the size of latest generations are quite small (yes, I know ITER is as large as possible), an order of magnitude of magnitude of reduction means the reactor would be 10 times smaller, which I doubt it can be possible just from the switch to room temperature superconductors, and regarding James Webb sensors, James Webb telescope is deployed in deep space, around 3K ambient temperature, again any room temperature superconductors will make no difference.
niio
This article had nothing about LK-99. Two sentences in the linked article summary was more descriptive than these 2k words:

"The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress."
vince
A true cheap superconducting compound would put an end to the fossil fuel era. The collapse in oil prices worldwide would be calamitic. Your talking 99% reduction in value of those $100 trillion valuations of oil and gas deposits worth less than $1 trillion overnight.
Troublesh00ter
The one major bugaboo in the midst of all this is actual current capacity of the superconductor. My understanding is that a great deal of the non-supercooled superconductors that have been discovered to date become unstable above a given current limit, and that those current limits can be LOW, less than one Ampere. If we're going to get all hot and bothered about a development in superconductivity, I would like to know a LOT more about the capabilities of the material in question, and virtually NONE of that is discussed in this article.

So pardon me if I remain skeptical.
NMBill
Cold Fusion,anyone? Those of us who remember the hubbub around that "breakthrough" 35 years ago may be forgiven for being skeptical. And remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
reader
Good article about the potential benefits of the high temp super conducting which this LK99 discovery may lead to. I like the part about compact batteries and maglev trains.

@NMBill Regarding similarities to the cold fusion debacle: it was intentionally suppressed at the time and derided after but has since been proven legitimate many times. Recently there was a new paper published on January 15th 2023 in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy called “How to achieve the Fleischmann-Pons heat effect”. The author is: M.R. Staker of Loyola University (Maryland USA)

Abstract: “To understand if cold fusion produces nuclear energy, a calorimeter was designed for electrolysis of Pd in heavy water with a precision of ± 0.5%: it exhibited excess power levels of between 20 and 240 W/cm3 accompanied by excess heat of 150 MJ/cm3 or 14 000 eV/atom of Pd, corroborating the original findings and verifying a nuclear source. An extra (other than commonly used Pt/H2O) control experiment using Pd/D2O lacked essential conditions necessary for producing the Fleischmann-Pons heat effect and so did not yield the Fleischmann-Pons heat effect, and neither did all Pt/H2O controls. Ten hard-to-achieve but vital conditions are disclosed for a recognizable (measurable) Fleischmann-Pons heat effect; and these resulted in 100% reproducibility in this study. The phenomenon should not be rejected as a valid topic of research: it is not Rutherford’s moonshine and rejection was categorically premature.”

Full text is available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319922047140

So there you go.
Jeff NOLA
Regarding who could get computer time pre-1980, Dartmouth gave every student a user id and password to their timesharing system. You could sit down at a terminal and program in a variety of languages including of course, Dartmouth BASIC. You could play games. Chess took so much runtime back then that you could only play a few moves before you would exceed your runtime limit. Still, however, it was computing for the masses and not just the elite.
Mark Hentz
Its still good to dream :)
A.L.
In its cheerleading for the advent of superconductivity, the article veers into the real, of the impractical and silly, to wit:

“Superconductors could lead to … space telescopes as sensitive as the James Webb but a fraction of the size and able to be mass produced.”

No, sorry, but the Webb’s size has little to nothing to do with the size, speed and power usage of its circuitry and everything to do with the fact that optical telescopes’ resolving power are tied to the physical size of their mirrors: the bigger they are the greater their light-gathering power, a consequence of the immutability of wavelengths of visible and invisible light in the electromagnetic spectrum.