[jmward01]

The great thing about watching advances in superconductors is that any day we could discover the first true practical room temp superconductor and that one day changes the world immensely. I personally think we are likely to find one in the next 5-10 years, but that estimate is based on nothing but hope and optimism on my part.

[dtquad]

For the most valuable applications it is also "good enough" to find a superconductor that can be cooled with cheap liquid nitrogen and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity, and thermal stability of a superconductor cooled with expensive liquid helium.

Some so-called "high temperature" superconductors begin superconducting at liquid-nitrogen temperature or higher. However in real life applications like MRI and particle accelerators it turned out that they still need to be cooled with much colder liquid helium to get the desired magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity etc. Finding a high-quality liquid-nitrogen-grade superconductor with these desired properties would be a revolution in itself.

[nine_k]

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

[jmyeet]

> Transmission lines alone would be huge.

Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances.

Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't have this property. Even if they could, what would the weight be? Would the cross-section need to be much larger? Particular to this family of superconductors, tungsten isn't exactly the easiest thing to do deal with, particularly on a massive scale.

There's an interesting Reddit thread about this topic [1]. One issue it raises is we'd need to essentiaally rebuild our entire infrastructure and transformers are a big part of that.

Personally, I think energy is going to get an awful lot more local. Solar is our future (IMHO). The ability to store excess power generated during the day and then use it when it's dark or cloudy will obviate the need to expensive long-line transmission infrasturcture from distant power plants.

Lastly, the GP is correct: liquid nitrogen is incredibly cheap. It's basically the cost of drinking water. Getting something we could use at liquid nitrogen cooling temperatures would be incredibly impactful.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/12etlkr/wouldnt...

[nick3443]

Cheaper batteries meeting the storage requirements for renewables would be a game changer!

[astrange]

We're getting that.

https://www.caiso.com/documents/2023-special-report-on-batte...

[nine_k]

I suppose that power lines may start looking more like pipelines. These can be above-ground is the actual piping is not heavy, on lower pylons with a reduced span. Liquid nitrogen is lighter than water, does not need high pressure, and the insulation is mostly styrofoam.

The voltage can be substantially lowered, because high currents don't lead to high losses; the current may be made as high as practical, near to the limit of the material's superconducting state.

[zahlman]

>Lastly, the GP is correct: liquid nitrogen is incredibly cheap. It's basically the cost of drinking water.

Hold on, what? How?? Reaching that temperature seems like a difficult task; and what's used as a source of pure nitrogen, anyway? Is there some clever trick to separating it out from the air?

[BurningFrog]

Maybe superconducting transmission lines need to be underground

[popol12]

How would we cool transmission lines to liquid nitrogen temperature?

[yencabulator]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gFUwGedayw

[anyfoo]

> Transmission lines alone would be huge.

Or small! :D

[nine_k]

But either way freezin' cool!

[BariumBlue]

I know we've got cuprates, superconductors formed with copper oxide, useful up to 133Kelvin, higher than Nitrogen cooling's capability of 77K.

I've read of them being used in wind turbines and particle accelerators, as well as concepts for fusion reactors.

Your comment makes it sound like they have insufficient field tolerance / current characteristics though. I don't think I've heard about Cuprates at all recently.

[throwup238]

Cuprates are also brittle ceramics so they’re difficult to shape and larger pieces and assemblies tend to run into issues with grain boundaries that interfere with superconductivity, so there’s a lot of practical issues. The classic superconductors are very low temperature but are much easier to cast.

[FredFS456]

There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.

[cyberax]

I invested in a couple of fusion startups (because why the hell not?), and the word on the street is that flexible tapes/wires are still not a solved question. Nobody can make them with consistent quality in large enough batches.

[dtgriscom]

Data point: liquid nitrogen is cheaper than milk.

[jmward01]

How interesting..... Of course liquid nitrogen + milk (with one or two other things) is worth more than the sum of its parts.

[nharada]

Yeah, haven’t you seen how much they charge for Dippin Dots??

[nick3443]

How can we take advantage of this to reduce my grocery bill? :)

[saagarjha]

I mean it’s literally selling air :P

[Panzer04]

For the most valuable applications, sure - but a lot of the biggest historical advances came not from the first application of that new tech, but from that new tech becoming cheap and ubiquitous.

Maybe (cheap) room-temp superconductors won't actually be that interesting (maybe it just increases energy transmission efficiency 5-10%), but perhaps it's availability catalises a whole range of new applications that were never considered before.

[raelming]

If room temperature superconductors existed that were practical for transmission scale wires, it would be possible to make a global superconducting electrical grid. The middle East could fill their desert with solar panels and export that electricity to Europe. The sunny side of the planet could export solar power to the nighttime side of the planet. You could make electrical motors out of it a fraction of the size of current motors, like 1000 of horsepower out of a soda can, which would revolutionize the design of pretty much everything in the world with moving parts. Mechanical transmissions would go the way of the vacuum tube. Any vehicle or ship that's not completely electrified would be hybrid electric at least. You could also miniaturize transformers which has a lot more implications for making everything that uses a lot of power to be much more powerful and cheaper.

[NL807]

>and retain the magnetic field tolerance, current-carrying capacity

Even if it doesn't meet those requirements, room temperature superconductors will have immense value in low-power applications, micro electronics, sensing, etc.

[kulahan]

>to get the desired magnetic field tolerance

Interesting, then, that the article actually mentions a superconductor that got stronger in the presence of a magnet! Wild things we're learning here!

[AlexErrant]

I'm not a believer in that timeline. There's a large distance between superconductivity in the lab and commercial application (since you specified "changes the world immensely").

E.g. MRIs still use NiTi (critical temperature of ~10 kelvins), discovered in 1962, for a number of reasons (this is in spite of MgB2 having a critical T of ~39k, ReBCO with a critical T of ~90k, and BSCCO with a critical T of ~108k):

> In this paper, we analyze conductor requirements for commercial MRI magnets beyond traditional NbTi conductors, while avoiding links to a particular magnet configuration or design decisions. Potential conductor candidates include MgB2, ReBCO and BSCCO options. The analysis shows that no MRI-ready non-NbTi conductor is commercially available at the moment. For some conductors, MRI specifications will be difficult to achieve in principle. For others, cost is a key barrier. In some cases, the prospects for developing an MRI-ready conductor are more favorable, but significant developments are still needed. The key needs include the development of... [omitted]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5472374/

Unfortunately, it probably won't be as simple as "step 1 discover material, step 2 manufacture, step 3 profit".

[jeffparsons]

One exciting thing that could still happen in the shorter term (if/when a promising novel "high temperature superconductor" is confirmed) is an explosion of investment into research in the area. So even if it takes decades for Material X to end up in MRI machines, there would still be a steady stream of juicy progress to read about while we wait!

[FredFS456]

There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.

[tedsanders]

I'd bet that the first room temperature superconductor does not "change the world immensely."

Resistive losses are just one of very many attributes of a conductor. Others important attributes include:

- current capacity (will you need humongously thick wires to match charge carried by aluminum or copper?)

- ductility (can it be formed into wires cheaply?)

- cost (does CapEx outweigh electricity savings? is it expensive enough that people will cut and steal it?)

- weight (can it hang from power poles? can it be transported on the backs of trucks?)

- temperature sensitivity (does it crack at low temperature? melt at high temperature? change electrical properties depending on the weather? stop conducting on hot days?)

- chemical stability (will it oxidize over a 50-year lifecycle?)

- toxicity (will kids be poisoned if they touch it / eat it?)

- machinability (can it be formed into tiny wires? can it be patterned onto chips?)

- electromigration resistance (will the material break down over time from carrying charge?)

- tensile strength (can it be hung from power poles at their current spacing? would we need to rip out all power poles across the planet? would we need more expensive underground lines?)

- abundance in the Earth's crust (will the price skyrocket if we suddenly need to produce an annual megaton to replace the world's powerlines?)

- geographic concentration (are the primary deposits concentrated in a single country, introducing potential supply chain and geosecurity risks?)

- etc.

It's very likely that the first material which does better on resistivity is going to do worse on these other dimensions. Resistivity is rarely the number one criterion in selecting conductors, from power lines to computer chips.

One of the reason incumbent technologies are difficult to replace is that they win on criteria that are less salient to potential innovators. Aluminum is a common metal for power lines not because it has the lowest resistivity, but because it's by far the best we've got when evaluating this whole portfolio of needs.

[skeaker]

I think even if it's only usable in niche scenarios it would still be a commercial success. Superconductors are useful even when they're hard to use, as seen with existing cold temperature superconductors which a room temperature one could certainly replace and become a commercial success in doing so. With that said, you're likely correct that the first attempt won't catch on for mass adoption.

[zardo]

> as seen with existing cold temperature superconductors which a room temperature one could certainly replace and become a commercial success in doing so.

High temperature superconductors are only seeing commercial use in the last few years (after their discovery in the 80s) due to issues like poor ductility.

[SequoiaHope]

Well lots of these limit the applications but something could have these limitations and still be a commercial success in some valuable niche fields.

[ethbr1]

Electromagnets.

[NullHypothesist]

Better scientific understanding of the underlying process (as highlighted by this article), better pattern detection (AI), and better simulation capabilities (quantum computing) all point to accelerating progress on this front.

What makes me particularly optimistic is the wide range of scenarios in which superconductivity is observed (also highlighted in the article); different mechanisms leading to a similar result suggests much better opportunity for the existence of a room-temp SC than if it were a highly similar pattern.

Certainly such a discovery has some serendipity and luck baked in, but given these advances across the board, 5-10 years seems like a reasonable bet (then another decade or two to widespread adoption). Let's hope we don't blow everything up before then.

[fuzzfactor]

From the final paragraph:

_experimentalists are still the ones leading the way. “Everyone’s rushing as fast as they can,” Yankowitz said._

In my experience, the final line is what contributes to my optimism most:

_“I can’t believe that we’re six years in and you can’t take a break.”_

[IAmNotACellist]

Too soon. I still tear up over LK-99

[tizzy]

Is their existence just speculation or is there mathematical / empirical observations that suggest they exist we just don’t know about them? Is it guaranteed, or highly likely, that one exists we just haven’t found it?

[Ygg2]

I don't think we'll really see a superconductor that ticks all the boxes.

Reality is too noisy for such effects to take hold. If there was I think evolution would have already used it by now.

[philipkglass]

Do you mean biological evolution? There are a vast number of useful materials that terrestrial organisms cannot evolve because they're incompatible with the chemical/physical conditions inside living things. Organisms never evolved the use of aluminum structures, for example, even though aluminum has many useful properties and is more terrestrially abundant than carbon.

[Ygg2]

High temperature superconductor could in principle be inside an organism, because it's not fixed to a specific element. And energy savings would be immense.

[EasyMark]

Why is room temperature important, what if "the world's first superconductor at 0C" was the headline?

[scheme271]

I don't think room temperature is important per se. Rather it's shorthand for a superconductor that functions without special cooling. Even if the temperature range is somewhat limited, it's still possible to be pretty useful (e.g. deep ocean temps are fairly cold and stable so a superconducting cable to power repeaters on fiber optic cables might be useful).

[jmward01]

I agree, 'room temp' isn't exactly precise. Even if it could work at 'room temp' if it didn't work just above that it would be too finicky for a lot of applications. Somewhere around there is likely the 'magic' point for a huge number of applications that will change the world. The perfect would be, of course, one with a very broad range of environments it could perform in. I think we are on track to figure out how to make something truly sci-fi in its properties: Strong, wide range of temp/conditions, flexible, etc etc. Once we get the theory perfect I bet the world will really open up.

[t0lo]

I don't think we need more change right now. We're struggling to make a healthy society with meaning with the leaps in technology of the past 15 years in ML and computing and manufacturing power/ actual power