The key thing to notice in this video is that the spec is levitating above a single monolithic magnet.
The levitation with ordinary diamagnets such as pyrolytic carbon requires an array of magnets to create a concave pocket in the field, otherwise the floating sample will "slide off" and fall. Monolithic magnets produce convex fields.
Some people elsewhere also commented that this could be a video of an ordinary high-temperature superconductor, but I doubt it. Such a tiny spec would warm up to room temperature very quickly. I've experimented with broken and shattered fragments of YBCO and it wasn't possible to make small pieces hover like this, they'd warm up too quickly. Also, they were always frosty looking. To make them look black you'd have to do it in a perfectly dry atmosphere, which is a non-trivial setup.
I had to look up "high-temperature superconductor" since it read like a typo:
> High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc or HTS) are defined as materials that behave as superconductors at temperatures above 77 K (−196.2 °C; −321.1 °F), the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures, close to absolute zero.
Despite their names suggesting otherwise, high-temperature superconductors actually require a colder environment than their room-temperature counterparts. This may seem counterintuitive, yet it's a perfect illustration of the idiosyncrasies that arise within complex systems that evolve over time. These naming conventions, like the codebases in large corporations, are the outcome of continual modifications that are so deeply ingrained, a complete overhaul would be prohibitively costly. When examining such codebases, inconsistencies and discrepancies are common, and they can appear almost ludicrous when compared side by side. However, it's crucial to understand that they are not mistakes, but rather footprints in the path of progression, mapping out the convoluted journey of technological evolution.
It's all relative: the "high temperature" is high compared to absolute zero (~77 K higher), but much lower than "room temperature" (which is defined as around 20° C). And of course these are separate categories, because room temperature is another ~220 K higher than "high temperature" (and also because "high temperature semiconductors" are common by now, whereas "room temperature semiconductors" remain the holy grail).
The comment made very good points. It explained how counter intuitive these particular technical terms are, explained the history behind this, and generalised this phenomenon to things some us might have more experience with.
I want to read more of that kind of comment not less.
I agree it doesn't sound like ChatGPT and the little codebase reference ChatGPT would not normally include.
The "However, ..." section at the end is a very common trope for ChatGTP to put some qualifications on what it just said and backpedal a bit. That is the only part that I feel might be confused for ChatGPT.
The content and the structure of the comment are both "high-quality" and useful, but at the same time they are of a very specific type of "quality" (the school essay format) that clearly rings ChatGPT-like.
Does HN have an official stance on AI-written comments?
How can you tell though? There are magnets which look like a single thing, but the polarity switches on the same side multiple times (sorry, I don't know what they're actually called).
This is very well done if faked (dated up the top left), so it would be another first if it was a real fake. That would also be exciting.
The strange things are...
No one else can find it yet.
It's not a phone video off a monitor, it's an actual video, time stamped and watermarked. Poster says Twitter is lowing the quality. It's also a strange aspect ratio and position for lab video (that watermarks a date).
The "LTC" watermark in blue might refer to "linear timecode" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_timecode and I guess it's possible whatever equipment they used to embed the timestamp in the video also adds this watermark.
There is not enough liquidity. The max profit you can take from that market by betting on yes at this point is around $17,000. It probably costs something like that or more to do a convincing fake at this point.
Curious, what does the text flying by on the screen say on the bilibili video? I’m always amazing at the cultural differences in design and how Chinese apps tend to always be so busy. Everything feels like a slot machine.
That thing is called "弹幕DanMu" (Barrage), which is a type of synchronized comment that appears alongside video playback. In this video, most of the comments are related to "taking a group photo" and "sending blessings". Perhaps because Chinese characters can convey more information in shorter sentences, this form of commentary is not as popular in other places, but it can actually be quite interesting. It provides an interactive experience that transcends time and space. On Bilibili, you can adjust the display area, font size, transparency, scroll speed, and intelligent prevention of blocking the main content for danmu. If you don't like it, you can turn it off.
It originated from the japanese video sharing website Niconico. It gives the users a sense of participation. Some twitch streams also have on-screen elements that can be controlled by chat. Many twitch viewers enjoy chaos and like mindlessly spamming and reposting copypastas.
Youtube annotations (those coloured speech-bubbles that did not work on mobile) were (mis)used in a similar way - some uploaders opened them for everybody, allowing all users to leave a "comment" in form of an annotation at a certain point in the video.
Watching movies on Chinese movie sites also gives you these comments.
I think they're insanely distracting, and they only get worse the better I get at understanding them. But then again, people disagree on whether you should talk during movies, too. If it's a bad movie, sometimes the user commentary is better.
The original source of the video (from a telegram channel?) has the rock floating horizontally, which would make an actual superconductor much more plausible.
Perhaps an effect from how small the pieces are? Even a "non-potato" camera will have problems with tiny things at close ranges unless you have additional lenses/equipment.
Yeah. To film a small sample properly you want a camera with manual focus such as a mirrorless and a proper macro lens. Not a setup you’d find sitting around a lab unless you were making videos like this regularly.
Yeah I have a feeling university labs aren't exactly well funded enough to just have a DSLR on hand. All of these videos are probably taken with the researcher's phone.
It's not that they aren't well enough funded to have a DSLR on hand. They'll often have very much more expensive cameras in the lab, but they'll be purpose-built into other very expensive equipment such as microscopes. It's more that a requirement to take DSLR-type photos in a lab is so very rare and unusual that they don't bother getting one, and then when there is a sudden need to take a photo of something startling, the nearest camera (the phone in the pocket) is reached for. Clearly if there were a requirement to take a quality photo for a journal, then the correct piece of equipment would be obtained, but these images that we're seeing aren't intended for that.
You fight wars with the army you have, not the army you want.
In this day and age, practically everyone has a potato in their pocket. Almost noone has a professional video camera with requisite lens assembly costing at least several grand total in their pocket (not that one would fit in there).
Unless you have a way to manually control the focus, I doubt it. Tracking a tiny target like that above a magnet would confuse the auto focus on just about any camera. With manual focus and very steady hands, maybe?
The best results I've had with small things are using the super zoom telephoto lenses like on samsung s22. I haven't seen a smartphone macro lens that takes decent photos of things yet (unless the subject is perfectly still). Perhaps the latest gen has found a way but in smartphone land you're mostly relying on software post processing since they capture so little light.
If just taking pictures, it is doable with an iPhone, but you probably have to fire a series of snaps to get a decent one. I tried taking a picture of a ordinary garden ant at some point, and it came out surprisingly well. That's rather difficult because the little critters refuse to chill still.
Every single thing bought in the lab has to be justified. If there had not been a need to take videos of hovering mm-scale superconducting fragments before, a good videography setup may not be present in the lab. And don’t get me started on what it would take to GET one…
This whole saga is so exciting to watch. Maybe someone with a background in material science and/or engineering can help me out with a question: _If_ LK-99 turns out to be a room temperature superconductor how likely do you think it will be that we figure out how to to mass produce it in sufficient quality and quantity so that it can in fact be used for all the exciting applications we have for rtscs?
I mean it's one thing to create a lab sample at 10% yield the size of a thumbnail but another thing entirely to create super long cables or massive amounts of motor parts or large sheets of it for MRTs.
Is it a matter of time? Or could some applications remain elusive because of other potentially undesirable properties of the material (brittleness, heterogeneity, you name it)?
If its real, it's going to excite a metric fuckton of funding in hightc superconductors research.
It doesn't have to be LK99. It'll be one of the other variants that we discover.
Others with more knowledge materials production please add more to this... but it's certainly encouraging there's no rare earth metals or anything radioactive as a component!
I would much rather have rare earth metals involved than lead.
(Rare earths are neither particularly rare nor particularly toxic. They do seem to have the annoying property that there aren’t that many large rare earth mines.)
Similar ceramic or crystalline superconductors took a long time to convert into useful cables. One technique is to fill a hollow silver(!) tube with powder, and then press it flat to compress the grains so that they touch. It may be possible to re-use similar techniques as-is, but that's hard to predict.
One theoretical paper suggests that the copper doping has two ways of occurring in the crystal structure, and that the more energetically favoured one is not the desired configuration. It may be very challenging to produce the desired crystal structure in bulk, and then it might not be stable over long time periods.
With most superconductors, they start to lose their benefits close to their critical temperature. So this material may not be able to support strong magnetic fields or high currents.
I expect thin-film applications to happen first. It's easy to control, easy to make large contiguous surfaces, and very useful for all sorts of things. Thin motherboards, LCD/OLED display panels, flat antennas, etc, etc...
If this room-temperature superconductivity result is real, I have high hopes on the improvements they can possibly bring to the field of electrical metrology. Many precision measurement instruments require superconductive Josephson junctions, such as reproducing the definition of the SI volt [0], or magnetic field measurements with SQUID. But these exotic devices only exist in top research labs due to extremely high maintenance cost, including cooling requirement.
Imagine a day when every medium-sized research lab has direct access to the quantum-accurate SI volt and nobody needs to send their voltmeters out for calibration anymore (although I don't know how hard would it take to make a microchip with 10,000+ Josephson junctions out of it...)
The 2V Josephson junction array chip (without the needed cryocoolers or support machinery) is $28,600 [1]. Full system is a bit under $300,000, without including installation, calibration, or training costs. They do still need calibration to ensure they're measuring the output voltage properly.
Isn't it true we've only tested superconducting materials at very low temps? Perhaps their robustness falls tremendously when not hundreds of degrees in the negative
Rather than this particular "magic" material, LK99, in the original paper(s), authors propose their theory on why this material is behaving the way it is. This is a totally new way for achieving superconductivity in room conditions. If it is confirmed to be true, scientist can try to create similar materials with similar lattice structures focusing on what's needed, rather than focusing on LK99.
Even if LK99 may not, one of the materials with similar properties they will create may be easy to produce and robust to use.
It's a great question. I don't think anyone has a certain answer but it's definitely a real risk. The quick example is graphene which has all kinds of interesting properties, but, as far as I can tell, no practical applications primarily due to production issues
the original poster said that this video was sent to him by a fellow researcher who received it on telegram from 'a colleague'. no further details given. if this is truly lk99 showing flux pinning, then that would be very strong evidence that it's also a superconductor. (physics bsc here, my only experience with condensed matter is 1 course and nothing more)
It looks like that permanent magnet it's hovering over is a simple dipole magnet, rather than an array. A diamagnet would be unstable in that position. Look at any video of floating graphite and you'll see it hovering on top of a 2x2 array of magnets.
Of course, you could fake it for a video by buying a special disc magnet with a multipolar magnetization pattern, but magnets like that are pretty hard to find.
If you already had a multipolar magnet for some reason, on the other hand, this wouldn't be too far fetched. You've got to think that with all the interest in this right now, the confluence of having access to a handy collection of peculiar magnets, knowing what to do with a bit of graphite, and being enough of a troll to publish a video, all in a single individual, isn't going to be that unlikely.
It looks (could be faked) like flux pinning is happening. Essentially, it's not moving but staying in place. Imagine trying to balance a magnet on another. It would not inherently stay in place.
Yes - Meissner effect is also called Flux Pinning. Superconductor will remain pinned to the magnet in any orientation. Diamagnet will only repel. The video shows horizontal hover - that confirms Meissner effect.
Flux Pinning is separate from the Meissner effect. Flux pinning only happens in Type II superconductors, where the Meissner effect of expelling external magnetic fields happens with both Type I and Type II superconductors.
I've got to imagine this is fake (not LK-99, but this video specifically) because there's already other partial levitation videos out, and anyone that synthesized this material well enough to get full meissner effect levitation would post about it with their name (or lab name) attached ASAP.
edit: also the origin story sounds strange, unless translated badly "A fellow researcher of mine said he received this video from another colleague on Telegram."
Such people are commonplace when the stakes are low, but when the stakes are high, they are few. How many world-historical contributions can you think of which were made by people who intentionally remained anonymous? Satoshi is the only one who comes to mind.
What is with the large number of commentators who have a bizarre "static world" hypothesis of technology?
Like, roll back to 90s and tell me that Lithium-Ion batteries would be powering all my power tools today and be on-par or better then corded counterparts?
Every new tech gets bashed on HN, to the point where you'd think you're on AmishNews instead of HackerNews. There's a bizarre lack of ability to project into the future - if a piece of tech isn't 100% perfect right at launch, it's apparently useless.
Seen that for everything from 3D printing and AI to fusion and superconductors.
Some of us are just old. We have seen countless hype cycles. Many hyped up things do not pan out. So we all have a “show me” kind of attitude now.
Also for things that do pan out, they sometimes comes with unforeseen negative consequences.*
As a result, it’s hard to get excited about ”great new thing” these days.
* e.g. the internet; there was so much optimism over it in the 90s … no one foresaw its use to track and manipulate the public on a massive scale, the damage to mental health social media has afflicted, … etc.
This is my philosophy too. It’s fun to be excited! Way more fun than being pessimistic. I think the naysayers just handle disappointment differently than I do.
> you lose nothing being enthusiastic for new tech that doesn't pan out
I would be wasting attention on it. I kind of wish that the front page isn’t flooded with so much speculative news - when it reaches a certain level it becomes noise drowning out the signal. Tell me when you have definitive results.
It's stronger than that, I think. Cynicism has the cost that you don't get to spot where the truly valuable applications of a technology are. Yes, you don't waste time on applications that don't pan out, but you want to spend your brain cycles filtering those out quickly.
In my experience old people welcome innovation because they saw a lot of great things happening in their life. When you say old, are you more in the 40s or the 80s?
I just approach “next big thing” with caution these days. It will either go nowhere or actually work but will have unforeseen fallout that we have to deal with / live with.
> Every new tech gets bashed on HN, to the point where you'd think you're on AmishNews instead of HackerNews.
That's extremely funny, thank you :)
It also makes a very valid point about human nature: we are resistant to acceptance of news that will change our worldview to the point that when presented with evidence of something new our first reaction seems to be to go into denial.
Well, denial is a good first bet. Most things that surface like this are bullshit. But not all. And the ones that aren't change the world.
I went from feeling this had a 5% probability of being true to 35% or so in the past few days. In the end that belief is going to reach 0.00001% or 99.99999%; but until it settles in one of those places it's going to drift like it's being blown by the wind.
And when it's real-- do we get something useful from it in 5 years or never? It's taken us decades to get significant high temperature superconductor applications.
In the end, there's so much uncertainty, and until it all settles out we can either be ambivalent or cheer for a side.
If it is real you can expect an influx of funding into improving the material, similar to how the discovery of the first practical superconductor led to finding a bunch of others with a steady increase in working temperature. But this time the funding will be much larger because the market for a room temperature superconductor are far, far larger than for one that requires a large cooling installation. I figure a few years at most for improvements on the yield to the point that you can start thinking about commercialization. The first party to complete this will make bank in an obscene way.
> I figure a few years at most for improvements on the yield to the point that you can start thinking about commercialization.
There is no guarantee that "if this is real" that there's a workable path to current densities and manufacturing ease that leads to commercialization-- ever.
And if there's a path, it's difficult to predict how long following that path will take.
YBCO dates to 1986 and requires much less of a cooling installation than the superconductors that are in use today. We are just reaching commercial use in the past few years...
Lion batteries have no doubt done amazing things but aside from the connivance they absolutely suck for power tools. I’m not even that old and nearly all my lion power tools original batteries are dead. Knock off replacements are available but as batteries improved companies stopped selling branded batteries. It’s a constant exercise keeping everything even just usable much less usable for any lengths of time.
Meanwhile my 50+ year old inherited drills and saws work flawlessly.
None of this battery shit is sustainable in any sort of way when the batteries last 3-5 years. You can be sure you won’t be handing any of those tools down.
They are not selling the tools anymore. They have new versions with new batteries. In most cases higher voltage so at least there is some technical reasoning behind it but not always.
There already is standardisation, of a sort. A lot of these things will just be a bunch of 18650's in a fancy box. As long as you can get into the box, you can replace the cells.
Rather than standardised boxes, I'd settle for manufacturers just using accessible screws to hold the battery together.
The 90s? It depends on where you worked and what you read. Li-ion wasn't exactly a bolt from the blue.
Material properties are an issue to consider. If they've been working for 25 years "knowing" this product is there, I'd be a little conservative about how much of the sky I'd let my pie consume.
Even if synthesis is perfected, it's a ceramic. It may end up being a superconductor along only one axis. That's not a recipe for ductile feedstock.
I bet it's fatigue from the endless <new shiny thing> hype. It's easy to fall into a routine of dismissing everything that claims to be new and interesting.
To be fair, this is a laboratory sample to test the materials not a means of mass manufacturing. Same could of been said of Carbon nano tubes back in the mid 90's.
Yes, it could be a very long path to mass manufacturing, if it ever happens, but it is far to early to dismiss the potential of this straight up.
Yeah, carbon nanotubes are pretty simple to produce. You can buy them online for a few dollars per gram. It's combining them together into large structures that retain their strength that is still in the research stage.
At least in the few-hundred tons a year range. It depends on the exact type though, the multi-walled kind are a lot cheaper than the single-walled ones which have the most interesting properties.
The idea that you can determine those limits from a short video of an unrefined specimen of the first-ever synthesized bit of a brand-new material is just silly.
It's not possible for anyone to know yet whether this advancement, if real, will result in "power lines from Alaska to New York" at this time, in either direction.
Auto-translated > This is the first time I've been joining Twitter to this question. Looking for the source of this video. My fellow researcher said he received this video from another colleague on Telegram.
So the "source" is someone asking if anyone knows the source. This video could easily be a hoax.
As a non physicist here, why not showing a video of a ohmmeter showing zero's when measuring the resistance of this material instead of its levitation?
A Meissner effect demo is usually seen as an easier and stronger proof of superconductivity than a resistance measurement, which is a delicate task and susceptible to experimental errors.
First, one cannot measure superconductivity with an ordinary ohmmeter. Electrodes, wires and the ohmmeter itself are resistive, the meter can never show zero ohms. So you can't just look at the screen read-out and say there's superconductivity, you need to set an experiment up to do it manually, with a current source and a voltmeter to measure the IV curve across the material [1]. Even then, the voltmeter will never show "zero" volt because of noise, such as thermocouple effect, triboelectric effect, or electromagnetic interference - which need to be minimized during the experiment and removed during post-processing. There are also the problems of sample preparation and purity as others have noted.
Look at how tiny the spec is. What would be the most convincing evidence? A resistence meter that basacally touches itself or a spec clearly floating on a magnet without cooling.
Why is everything surrounding this discovery seem so amateur? From the initial paper being so flimsy to all the "leaked" videos looking like it was taken by a monkey trying to learn how to video tape for the first time.
Like, is it that difficult to try to get a decent video of something that is life changing?
Yes. The intersection of people who have been lucky enough to make a working sample and people who have decent video equipment has no reason to be other than an empty set.
Yeah it’s hard for me to take any of this at face value given how absolutely janky the evidence is thus far. I’m waiting for some non-potato cam footage with a human saying “hey watch this superconductor footage, this is what we did to make the material”
Edit: Is it possible to replicate the structure of this material using carbon nano-tubing? Someone mentioned packing ceramic like materials into silver tubes as a means of making cables; can that be done with carbon nano-tubing?
What's stopping us from using superconductors to link power grids together? Does this technology enable more solar energy use without overloading the disconnected power grids?
The bulk cost of this material is not going to be the problem with commercialization. The ingredients and labor aren't very expensive. The problem is that no one has found a process to consistently make chunks bigger than like a rice grain of this stuff.
If you can grow it in a constrainted geometry a grain of rice is a very large footprint for IC design.
The real revolution with something like this is in IC design (computers & Sensors) and maybe Transformer/Inductor/Coil design. Nobody is realistically expecting to roll out hoverboards or HVDC cables with this crystal.
Wouldn't we need it to be a semiconductor to be useful for ICs? Also what kind of ICs are we talking here? The handful of nanometer cutting edge stuff for compute or power ICs for charging circuits and similar stuff?
idk they’re talking like if it’s real then we’ll have all these breakthroughs. so wanted to know if even if it’s real if it may be in feasible economically
The lead content may well be a barrier to commercialization. There are plenty of use cases for which a material that is likely brittle and contains a large fraction of lead is a problem.
(If this is real, I would expect other related materials that don’t contain lead to be found.)
The levitation with ordinary diamagnets such as pyrolytic carbon requires an array of magnets to create a concave pocket in the field, otherwise the floating sample will "slide off" and fall. Monolithic magnets produce convex fields.
Some people elsewhere also commented that this could be a video of an ordinary high-temperature superconductor, but I doubt it. Such a tiny spec would warm up to room temperature very quickly. I've experimented with broken and shattered fragments of YBCO and it wasn't possible to make small pieces hover like this, they'd warm up too quickly. Also, they were always frosty looking. To make them look black you'd have to do it in a perfectly dry atmosphere, which is a non-trivial setup.