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I think the idea behind it is really clever. You don't know how to manufacture the material. Create a test that separates the good particles. Sieve through mountain of crushed material, out comes small amount of good stuff. Genius.

I would call it the "Cinderella Method" after the German version of it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Aschenputtel,_by_th... ("Die Guten ins Töpfchen, die Schlechten ins Kröpfchen"_)

Why do the good ones go in the potty and the bad ones in the crib? (Google Translate.)

Potty would be a small pot, for keeping the lentils. Crib is a mistranslation, I don't know German well enough to know if it's even a possible translation but the word means small crop. The ashes go into the crop because they are fertilizer. Both words, pot and crop, are in diminutive form which makes the sentence have a sing-song feel and memorable.

Crop as in "bird's throat", I think. Good goes in the kitchen, bad goes in the pigeon.

Good goes in the pot, bad goes in the crop. (i.e. keep the good, toss the bad)

Agreed very cool. I had seen a previous process where sorting out conductive nanotubes from non-conductive ones by inducing a current in them and pull them into a different sluice with a magnetic field. Interesting stuff.

Yeah this is almost common at this point, specifically with carbon nano structures. The reason why is it is very expensive to manufacture specific structures but cheap and easy to make a ton of random structures. So yeah you "just" sort through the random ones, of course sorting through to find the desired structure can be fantastically difficult, but hey it works!

Half of chemistry/chemical engineering seems to be just various techniques of separation of the things you want from the thing you don’t want. Strong magnets might be unusual, but chemistry is full of doing strange things to get results.

I just watched the explosions and fire guy set fire to a mixture of things to synthesize something. If i remember correctly it was a glowing nanoparticle.

The idea that graphite may contain in inclusions that are superconducting at room temperature is highly speculative (putting it mildly) and not an idea that is taken seriously in the condensed matter physics community.

Possibly, but a lot of real progress has been made by trying things that turn out to work and then working backwards to figure out how.

If this ever works/worked I would agree, but the linked paper is not at all convincing.

This is from October 2024 and appears to have made no splash whatsoever, which probably tells you what you need to know about it.

This was my thought.

Given the recent public drama from other groups claiming the same things, maybe the quiet approach means real science is being done here, which takes time to verify.

So we’ve gone from the best semiconductor we can manage is -73 degrees C at huge pressures to we can do it past water boiling? This is a huge leap forward no?

> It suggests that, if the Aquadag paint instead of being fabricated from normal graphite particles is made from the sorted superconducting ones, we would obtain a superconducting paint whose resistance might be possibly zero above room temperature allowing for the design of superconducting circuits at room temperature

There must be some nuance here that requires some expertise to understand since I would think Tc up to 500K is way above room temperature but they’re being very cautious about saying they could build such circuits. Is that because circuit manufacturing is an even higher temperature process or something else?

This seems like a revolutionary result that’s the first step in changing everything we do in electronics from computers to travel. What’s the reason to contain excitement?

They're claiming to have found a small number of microscopic particles that are superconducting at 500K, with details on how they found those particles. They acknowledge that making contact with those particles to directly test their resistivity is particularly challenging. That is, even if this is true, there's a long road between the discovery of microscopic particles and mass manufacturing / large scale integration.

It would be quite inappropriate for them to brag about revolutionizing anything at this stage. The field recently witnessed that with overstated claims surrounding LK99. Much more appropriate to publish methods and allow other groups to verify or refute their findings.

They’re measuring particles they think are superconductive, but these are measured in micrometers. Optimism and measurement error are entirely possible.

If you could, for example, demonstrate flux pinning at room temperature on a sample of material weighing at least a gram, that would be exciting.

These first announcements aren’t exciting because they are far too possibly wrong. Good enough for funding the next study, not for getting folks on the internet excited.

all of the standard caviats apply of course, but the premise is in itself worthy of attention and fits in with a great deal of the background work in all of human technology ,ie: " wait, wait some of this stuff is different, look there, there it did a THING", its how our ancient ancestors got us ceramics and metals and glass. And the history of white light led's started with exceptionaly rare, fluke, white light led's, that eventualy were proven to be the result of very tiny amounts of "contamenents" that produced the effect, took them decades to narrow it down, and figure it out, and then scale up to production levels. Now the research tools are, way better, smaller, cheaper, and in thousands of labs world wide....so

I gotta say wow.

This is the first potentially viable mechanism I've heard of that might just do this, it's also easily verifiable - using existing non room temperature super conductors.

like panning for gold, but using their magnetic properties.

if you can sort say -127'C superconductors by putting them through the field at <-127'C

then you can sort 30'C superconductors by putting them through the field at <30'C

This sounds like it has great potential across the board - one of the biggest issues so far - at least as my very limited knowledge understand it - even for the lower temperature superconductors has been removing the "bad" material, a "cheap and easy" method to do that sounds like a great leap forward.

Indeed, wow. Has anyone reproduced this result?

The separation process has some similarity to electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes. Only more difficult.

This is a reproduction, it looks like it was first shown by T Scheike et al in 2013

Is magnetic field sorting a novel method for superconductors in general?

I misinterpreted the outcome, my thought was along the lines of "are they creating (eg) SSH keys out of magnetic charges and radix-sorting them to find the factors" (or something).

eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3YnENM0cFg

...we're at the materials science stage where it's not out of the realm of possibility to "do it with the atoms" and "let god/physics sort it out".

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/1gm4w4i/is_ther...

What is it about cold temperatures that makes something superconductive?

The hand waviest simplest answer i can think of is... basically quantum effects dominate and require that the background thermal noise be eliminated to be pervasive.

Its like trying to juggle on a top of a moving plane - the balls won't really do what you want with 300mph winds blowing. Go inside on steady ground and your tosses are the dominant forces on the balls.

There are a lot of skeptical comments here, but the authors make this claim in the abstract:

> We have obtained a concentrate of above room temperature superconducting particles.

Is this just a lie?

As discussed in the Reddit thread linked elsewhere, this is far more likely to be sloppy research and misinterpretation of data than a deliberate lie. It's not trivial to accurately determine whether a tiny collection of graphite particles is actually superconducting.

This sounds too good to be true, yet the paper is oddly compelling.

They don't claim to explain how it works, they just provide a method to find naturally occurring superconductive particles and sort them out, presumably, so we can further study them and hopefully, figure out how to make more, more reliably.

It should be compelling they been confirming these claims in papers for decades now. What a grift.

Would a room temperature superconductor that costs, say, $100k for a pound be useful in any way?

i wonder if it would efficiently absorb electromagnetic waves and through coupling with a more resistive layer thermalize that energy.

buyers of such materials could certainly afford that price tag

Sounds like it could at least build cheaper MRIs.

What about the superconducting graphite particles with a TC <$400k/yr?

Now this is a clever comment

lk99 v2.0.0

400k ~ 260f / 127c

Absolutely! You read my mind. Moreover, lk99 was AI-generated. Is this one, too?

Why do you think that?