6 ms·

Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

231 points by ernesto95 2y ago

jmward01 2y ago
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.
- NullHypothesist 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.”_
- dtquad 2y ago
  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.
  - BariumBlue 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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.
  - NL807 2y ago
    >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.
- AlexErrant 2y ago
  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/ 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.
- IAmNotACellist 2y ago
  Too soon. I still tear up over LK-99
- tedsanders 2y ago
  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.
  - SequoiaHope 2y ago
    Well lots of these limit the applications but something could have these limitations and still be a commercial success in some valuable niche fields.
  - skeaker 2y ago
    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.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Why is room temperature important, what if "the world's first superconductor at 0C" was the headline?
  - jmward01 2y ago
    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.
  - scheme271 2y ago
    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).
- tizzy 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
- OhioMan2943 2y ago
  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
kurthr 2y ago
One thing that goes unmentioned about room temperature superconductors is that they store energy as well. U = (B2/(2u0))V. 2u0 is about 2.5E-6N/A2 So a 1m3 7T magnetic field would be about 20MJ or 7KWh. That doesn't sound like much, but collapse times could be microsec to generate GW of EM.
- xbar 2y ago
  This is a useful fact to have handy.
- justlikereddit 2y ago
  Commercial MRI quenching doesn't result in explosions and there's 7T research MRIs so I assume the issue with how to bleed off energy is solved in a safe enough manner already
- gaze 2y ago
  These novel new superconductors are generally considered to be "bad superconductors." They have really low critical fields.
Animats 2y ago
Wow. Go over to [1] and read the papers. This is good stuff. When someone finds new physics, interesting things result. Tungsten disulfide/boron nitride superconductors? That's a new direction. This article describes a new research result as a new research result, not as "trillion dollar industry by 2027". That helps credibility. [1] https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/long-ju/ https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/long-ju/
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  >This article describes a new research result as a new research result, not as "trillion dollar industry by 2027". I don't like that language either, but it may be wise to understand that different audiences are reading this, and it may be effective for the author to reach the others in this way. And besides, in general it's easier for a rationalist to ignore such language than it is for an industrialist to add it.
  - exmadscientist 2y ago
    Bollocks. "Hype language" has a very strong correlation with people who don't know what they're talking about. (Probably because most people who use it do not, in fact, know what they're talking about, even if some might.) So other experts in the field will look down on you if you speak like a British university press release.
    - simpaticoder 2y ago
      I agree with you. I just think it is wasted effort to complain about the quality of press releases. I am consigned to their poor quality, and my solution is to read primary sources.
- nomel 2y ago
  As someone who knows nothing about this, how is something like "Tungsten disulfide/boron nitride" selected? Is it based on some models? Or, is it more of a random walk?
metalman 2y ago
room temperature superconductors are inevitable, all matter is conductive and photo active in some way or another,and conduction is one of the non optional components of reality, so the number of possible compounds that might superconduct is huge and now that there apear to be multiple mechanisms that superconduction can function from, means that the search will begin in earnist its a multi trillion dollar app
- zardo 2y ago
  Is a 400C superconductor also inevitable?
  - justlikereddit 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Given enough pressure it already exists!
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Why is it inevitable? Is there some physics principle that proves they should exist even they're beyond current scientific knowledge?
steveoscaro 2y ago
Question - is this a field ripe for breakthroughs using advancing AI capabilities? Or not likely because LLMs haven’t ingested much data that could help reason in this field (or whatever reason)?
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  traditional LLMs do not reason
MrLeap 2y ago
Could this "reality search" stuff be parallelized? Could reaction permutation and property testing occur in a more automated fashion than is currently?
spullara 2y ago
I wish all the smart physicists were working on this instead of string theory.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  Why not both? We need people working on moonshots in hope of a breakthrough that will leap us forward. Even if, in case of string theory, we probably both agree that the chance is slim at this point (but I'm not a physicist, so nobody asked my opinion and nobody should listen to it).
BoneZone 2y ago
I worked in Cory Deans lab when he did a brief professorship at City College. He is the most sharply intelligent person I have ever worked with, a savage experimentalist always devising new ways to experiment in nanofabrication and his theoretical curiosity is boundless. Additionally, he’s a really nice Canadian when he goes to the pub! If you ever wonder why these products using graphene aren’t commercially viable, it is insanely difficult to work with and prepare. Imagine trying to make a sandwich that’s 5x5 microns in area and about 2-3nm thick. Graphene is essentially atomic tissue paper subject to all sorts of contamination and small scale effects.
sheepscreek 2y ago
Fascinating stuff. Though it puzzles me that some of these exotic superconductors have been known to us for years yet there’s not been much progress (esp the one with graphene sheets, with a 1 degree tilt). Is that because they are just so hard to synthesize? What would it take to get to the next stage? I came across another technique discovered many years ago, where they used scotch tape to alter the physical configuration of the material to make it superconduct. At room temperature, I believe. This all sounds very ground breaking to me, yet we don’t hear about any big co doing any work on them.

231 points by ernesto95 2y ago

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.

NullHypothesist 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.”_
dtquad 2y ago
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.
- BariumBlue 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
- NL807 2y ago
  >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.
AlexErrant 2y ago
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/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
IAmNotACellist 2y ago
Too soon. I still tear up over LK-99
tedsanders 2y ago
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.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Well lots of these limit the applications but something could have these limitations and still be a commercial success in some valuable niche fields.
- skeaker 2y ago
  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.
EasyMark 2y ago
Why is room temperature important, what if "the world's first superconductor at 0C" was the headline?
- jmward01 2y ago
  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.
- scheme271 2y ago
  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).
tizzy 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
OhioMan2943 2y ago
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

kurthr 2y ago

One thing that goes unmentioned about room temperature superconductors is that they store energy as well. U = (B2/(2u0))V. 2u0 is about 2.5E-6N/A2 So a 1m3 7T magnetic field would be about 20MJ or 7KWh. That doesn't sound like much, but collapse times could be microsec to generate GW of EM.

xbar 2y ago
This is a useful fact to have handy.
justlikereddit 2y ago
Commercial MRI quenching doesn't result in explosions and there's 7T research MRIs so I assume the issue with how to bleed off energy is solved in a safe enough manner already
gaze 2y ago
These novel new superconductors are generally considered to be "bad superconductors." They have really low critical fields.

Animats 2y ago

Wow. Go over to [1] and read the papers. This is good stuff. When someone finds new physics, interesting things result. Tungsten disulfide/boron nitride superconductors? That's a new direction. This article describes a new research result as a new research result, not as "trillion dollar industry by 2027". That helps credibility. [1] https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/long-ju/ https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/long-ju/

simpaticoder 2y ago
>This article describes a new research result as a new research result, not as "trillion dollar industry by 2027". I don't like that language either, but it may be wise to understand that different audiences are reading this, and it may be effective for the author to reach the others in this way. And besides, in general it's easier for a rationalist to ignore such language than it is for an industrialist to add it.
- exmadscientist 2y ago
  Bollocks. "Hype language" has a very strong correlation with people who don't know what they're talking about. (Probably because most people who use it do not, in fact, know what they're talking about, even if some might.) So other experts in the field will look down on you if you speak like a British university press release.
  - simpaticoder 2y ago
    I agree with you. I just think it is wasted effort to complain about the quality of press releases. I am consigned to their poor quality, and my solution is to read primary sources.
nomel 2y ago
As someone who knows nothing about this, how is something like "Tungsten disulfide/boron nitride" selected? Is it based on some models? Or, is it more of a random walk?

metalman 2y ago

room temperature superconductors are inevitable, all matter is conductive and photo active in some way or another,and conduction is one of the non optional components of reality, so the number of possible compounds that might superconduct is huge and now that there apear to be multiple mechanisms that superconduction can function from, means that the search will begin in earnist its a multi trillion dollar app

zardo 2y ago
Is a 400C superconductor also inevitable?
- justlikereddit 2y ago
  [flagged]
- bawolff 2y ago
  Given enough pressure it already exists!
EasyMark 2y ago
Why is it inevitable? Is there some physics principle that proves they should exist even they're beyond current scientific knowledge?

steveoscaro 2y ago

Question - is this a field ripe for breakthroughs using advancing AI capabilities? Or not likely because LLMs haven’t ingested much data that could help reason in this field (or whatever reason)?

ranger_danger 2y ago
traditional LLMs do not reason

MrLeap 2y ago

Could this "reality search" stuff be parallelized? Could reaction permutation and property testing occur in a more automated fashion than is currently?

spullara 2y ago

I wish all the smart physicists were working on this instead of string theory.

poincaredisk 2y ago
Why not both? We need people working on moonshots in hope of a breakthrough that will leap us forward. Even if, in case of string theory, we probably both agree that the chance is slim at this point (but I'm not a physicist, so nobody asked my opinion and nobody should listen to it).

BoneZone 2y ago

I worked in Cory Deans lab when he did a brief professorship at City College. He is the most sharply intelligent person I have ever worked with, a savage experimentalist always devising new ways to experiment in nanofabrication and his theoretical curiosity is boundless. Additionally, he’s a really nice Canadian when he goes to the pub! If you ever wonder why these products using graphene aren’t commercially viable, it is insanely difficult to work with and prepare. Imagine trying to make a sandwich that’s 5x5 microns in area and about 2-3nm thick. Graphene is essentially atomic tissue paper subject to all sorts of contamination and small scale effects.

sheepscreek 2y ago

Fascinating stuff. Though it puzzles me that some of these exotic superconductors have been known to us for years yet there’s not been much progress (esp the one with graphene sheets, with a 1 degree tilt). Is that because they are just so hard to synthesize? What would it take to get to the next stage? I came across another technique discovered many years ago, where they used scotch tape to alter the physical configuration of the material to make it superconduct. At room temperature, I believe. This all sounds very ground breaking to me, yet we don’t hear about any big co doing any work on them.