Superconductors have two main properties that we think will be very useful.
The first is that they expell magnetic fields (Meissner Effect) which allows them to float when placed in a large magnetic field. This might have applications for magnetic levitating trains.
The second property is that they conduct electricity with no resistance, not a small resistance but none at all. This means that we can transfer energy with 100% efficiency. With normal conductors there is a small amount of resistance but it all adds up to mean we lose a lot of energy to heat. Superconductors would eliminate that.
Now, we've known about superconducters for over 100 years, but the problem is that in order for them to have those two properties they need to either very cold (-196°C/-320°F or colder) or under a huge amount of pressure (like thousands of times atmospheric pressure). Since it's not very easy to create these conditions, we can really utilize superconductors outside of particular settings (like a million dollar MRI machine).
The big news right now is that this new material (LK99 doped with Copper) was claimed to be superconducting at room temperature and pressure, conditions that are very easy to create. There have been similar major claims like this in the past but everyone of them so far has turned out to be false, so don't get your hopes up yet.
The difference here is that the papers shared a recipe for how to make LK99 very explicitly, which hasn't been seen before. This is allowing for other physics groups to make and test the substance to verify the claims of the original authors. So far, I don't think it's shown to be superconducting in the lab, but there are simulations that show it might behave as claimed. We have yet to see what will happen but we should know in a few weeks or months if LK99 is really what they claim.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any follow ups.
Its really unusual with the formula
Like, for stuff like this it's usually very detailed. However the recipe calls for "tap water"...
Which is crazy because that can vary building to building, so people worldwide are going to have slightly different results.
It could still be real, but if it is then it's one of those fluke discoveries that changes life for centuries.
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One thing to add, the original sample was theorized to be superconductive due to the magnetic levitation, not a measurement of it's resistance. In truth, "diamagnetic semiconductors" exhibit a similar levitation but without the lack of resistance; it's now theorized that's what the original authors experienced. The initial paper was also released with slim details, a lack of peer review, and a lot of unknowns. It's possible that "doped with copper" is nuanced, and if you made 100 samples of this with different doping at an atomic level, you would get different results. That would mean "LK99" is easy to make, but "LK99 doped with copper to exactly achieve superconductivity at room temperature and pressure" is NOT easy to make, and we may not even have the tech to dope it precisely enough to be useful.
The more likely outcome is research into a new doping technique which leads to material meta-science that could, one day, get a superconductor with practical properties. But this was sort of hyped as "a room temp/pressure superconductor that any mid-tier lab could make" which is just false...there are youtube science channels out there synthesizing the stuff and it's just not what was "advertised."
There is a novel material called LK-99 that was purported to be a superconductor at standard temperature/pressure, but it turns out it may not actually be a superconductor. If it were true, it would've been a revolutionary breakthrough.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99
It might still result in it.
Right now the process might result in a material that superconducts at room temperature, it might only have some qualities at some temperatures, or it might not have any at any temp.
There's a lot in the process that's just blind chance, eventually we might be able to influence that chance
Sounds to me like the chemistry equivalent of trying to hit household objects with a hammer to make tones until you find one or make one that can shatter a wine glass.
100 billion kWh of electricity are wasted on transmission losses each year in the US alone. That's equivalent to 3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7. Superconductivity enables lossless electricity transmission at high voltages and currents.
Note: I might be confusing some of this with semiconductors, it's been a while since I learned about them.
Superconductors are used in computing. Specifically, the property of a superconductor is that the material offers no electrical resistance, and it expels magnetic fields around them. That last part is known as the Meissner Effect.
The fundamentals of modern computers rely on electricity. When an electrical current is running, it creates an electromagnetic field around the circuit. This can affect other nearby circuits. Have you ever had a set of headphones that also picked up the microphone when it shouldn't? This can be because two circuits are interfering with each other. This property also spurs innovation in transferring data, and shapes how we build things like ethernet cables to be resistant to outside interference.
Superconductors are appearing in the news because in some labs they've seen superconducting properties in materials that exist at room temperature. Before now, we've seen superconductors operating only at extremely low temperatures like 10K, aka 10C over absolute zero. That's friggin' chilly.
Quantum Computer Scientists use superconductors to make their computers run. It's not really my field, but as I understand it you need to keep the computer very cold while it runs, and even then it won't run for very long before heating up. My understanding of the state of the technology is that for this reason quantum computers are incredibly expensive and only last for a few seconds or minutes. A room temperature superconductor has the potential to change that.
Sometime in... I want to say the 1980's, we reached a point where we couldn't build computer processors that run faster than they do now. If we tried to make them run faster, they'd begin to heat up and melt. So we started working on making processors behave more efficiently. A potential use case for a superconductor would be in resuming the work on making processors run faster. If we can keep our existing methods of making more efficient processors and combine them with inherently faster technologies, it could mean big things in the world of computing.
We've only seen some preliminary results in labs, so I'm not sure people should be getting too over it yet. But it's an exciting development in the world of circuitry.
From what I've heard (feel free to add to it or to correct me):
Our technology uses normal conductors. Computers, gaming consoles, smartphones etc are all limited in their performance by the power of the conductors. Super conductors existed already, however they require (near to) freezing temperature. That obviously makes it impossible to use those superconductors in normal daily technology.
If however we could have superconductors who can work at normal temperature and don't require extreme cold, we could have superconductors that massively increase the efficiency of our technology (more efficient smartphone battery life, better electric cars etc)
There’s been mixed results so far. The problem everyone is having is recreating the exact same material Lee and Kim did in their lab. Not only do they have to manage to add a copper atom in there, but it needs to be in the correct spot. That’s why we’re seeing different results everywhere as labs around the world are trying to recreate this material. We won’t know for sure until somebody can prove they created LK99.