What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?
One of the reasons we can't build a practical fusion reactor is that we need to make very powerful electromagnets. Doing so requires a lot of electricity going through big circular circuits. Doing that without a superconductor creates too much heat and the whole thing melts.
They're trying to build them with existing superconductors instead, but those require super cold temperatures or super high pressure.
This is (maybe!) a superconductor that's cheap and exists at normal temperature and pressure.
It's got some deficiencies that would prevent it from being used in a fusion reactor, but it's existence may teach us how to build a better one that will work.
Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing.
> In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sputtering, and thermal evaporation, e-beam evaporation, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD), etc. are also included without limitation as long as the raw material can be deposited.
Listed methods are those used in semiconductor manufacturing to introduce materials to the wafers. It is also significant that the company's marketing material describes its resistance as "1/10^4 less than copper", because copper is currently used as a conductor in chips. (It wasn't always so, it used to be aluminium, which is a fascinating story itself. Read more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects.)
I think this terminology is really confusing for people not familiar with digital electronics. The term AC to a layman usually means a single sine wave like mains. The point is though that when square waves get really fast, they have a lot of high frequency content.
That becomes relevant for frequencies that are high enough to break Cooper pairs. But this material is claimed to be in the superconducting phase up to 400K, which corresponds to a superconducting gap of 8.3THz.
At the frequencies computer chips operate, it acts more like AC. Sure, you place some nice bypass capacitors capacitors very close to the chip so you can feed it nice clean DC power, but when you start switching those transistors in the GHz range, the signals inside the chip rapidly start to look a lot like AC.
You see the same thing with external signals, like a connection between CPU and memory. Operate the bus at 1MHz and it is effectively DC. The signal has a wavelength of 300 meters, so when the signal travels a distance literally two orders of magnitude smaller across your motherboard the AC behavior is negligible. Operate that same bus at 1GHz and your wavelength is down to 30cm. Got a 40cm-wide motherboard? Better treat it like a transmission line or it isn't going to work!
The latest versions of USB and PCIe are no longer binary digital signalling at all. It is a modulated radio signal [1] carried over a wire, similar to how DSL and cable modems work. Processor and memory busses will be next to switch over. Most digital systems will probably move in this direction as speeds continue to increase.
High-end CPUs are actually not powered directly by DC. Basically all server (and growing portion of consumer) CPUs are powered by multiphase buck regulators[1] which split the power from from the DC PSU rails into a parallel set of modulated buck regulator power stages. The outputs of the parallel regulators are recombined to generate DC (as the combined waveform of the phased AC parts).
The reason for this multiphase design is because it offers better power efficiency and better transient response to the CPU as the CPU moves between it's different power states (high vs low load).
Even on the DC input which ostensibly isn't doing anything it will probably be wiggling around a lot. You can attack electronic safes by analyzing the power draw into their computer as you type into
> Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing.
Power consumption due to R in metal stack is not a large proportion of total. There could be bigger opportunity in reducing wire delay though.
Anything that uses electricity would use less electricity because you aren’t wasting it as heat.
So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up. Or a flying car. Or power cables that lose nothing during travel.
Naturally that’s why it doesn’t make sense. It’s too game-breaking to be possible in normal conditions.
Glitching something out by making it basically maximum cold makes sense because you’re making it fully still so that it stops messing with the current. Glitching something out by squeezing it until it can’t move makes sense. Leaving it in a normal room means it would have to be something completely crazy.
> So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up.
I touched on this in a previous thread[1], but superconductors only stay superconducting below not just a critical temperature, but also below a critical current density and critical magnetic field strength.
These limits are different for different superconductors. It could very well be this superconductor has really high critical temperature but really low critical current density, in which case you can't have lots of current at zero resistance.
It makes about as much sense than a computer in your pocket that’s not even plugged in being many orders of magnitude better than a computer that takes up an entire room and can barely do on operation a second
>So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up.
That doesn't make sense. Power has to be consumed by something. All energy ends up as heat, so if the computer isn't heating up then the power consumption is 0W, not 1000GW.
>Or a flying car.
A flying car with superconducting motors would still have to expend the energy to stay aloft by pushing air downwards. Even without thermal losses to electrical resistance, you'd still have losses to friction from the moving components.
Converting magnetic force into electrical current (electromagnetic induction) is the principal behind of all electrical power generation. SMES (superconducting magnetic electrical storage) is essentially an inductor made using superconductors. Electrical current gets converted into magnetic force and then back into electrical current when the circuit is discharged.
I think we need force fields before we could make something like a lightsaber, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea how we could make a force field.
Power conversion losses account for about 60% of the energy that goes into electricity generation in the US [1]. Superconducting generators and transformers could take that figure down to a fraction of that.
Is this actually true? It is not obvious to someone somewhat versed in physics how this is enabled by room temperature super conductors unless the entire riding surface is magnetized.
You can have a global grid of solar power. Since you don't loose energy on transmission and half of the planet is illuminated by the sun at any given time, you can have uninterrupted solar energy 24/7. The fuel is practically unlimited, the only cost would be the initial cost of building it and then only maintenance cost.
It doesn't need to be done as a single super-project. Each step along the way could be a sensible, contained, and iteratively beneficial project. Lots of countries are already building up solar; as that progresses they could construct cross-border grid connections to balance out the load, then further build up solar capacity to be able to transmit your daytime excess to countries further from your solar peak. At that point it would only take a couple cross-ocean power lines to go from multiple continent-wide power grids to a single global one, and then everyone involved is even more incentivized to build excess solar capacity.
It's not a piece of cake, but it's not a wild idea either. Adding a pair of LK-99 lines alongside each existing undersea optical line potentially gets you there by just increasing the maintenance budget. Lossless power transmission could change a lot of previously fundamental assumptions.
Many grids are interconnected already and the electricity distribution is already an international business, if the lk-99 becomes available as a final product I don't see why would be hard to built a SC backbone. Not only electricity but international pipelines that move fossil fuels to thousand of kilometres away are already a common thing.
How I get my head around it is, a material forged under ambient pressure and room temperature may be superconducting (lose resistance) as either pressure goes up or temperature goes down (or both).. so if the material itself is forged under high pressure and high temperature, the room temperature normal to us is very low for the material (?).
Probably all materials are superconductors at some crazy pressure/temperature.
If this is true, I'm really curious why SK didn't bury them. Samsung foundries have been also rans for years, this seems like completely game changing technology. If it's real...
