I'm imagining a schoolkid in 2123 learning about the 3 types of superconductors, low-temperature, high-temperature and room temperature. Then they ask why 'high temperature' is cooler than room temperature, then the teacher explains it's historical terminology and everyone groans
Room temperature superconductors probably won't be made in our lifetime, or ever. Basically it requires a crystal structure that doesn't vibrate because of Brownian motion in my opinion, and I can certainly be wrong. Basically, it requires electrons to be able to move without bumping into atoms. You can do this at extremely low temperatures when the atoms are still, but if you send too many electrons through, it will breakdown the flow. I don't think this is possible as actual room temperature. LK99 was an error, or a fraud.
@@fuzzywzhe Average velocity is proportional to square root of temperature, so current high temp superconductors' atoms are vibrating at a speed approx 4 times faster than low temperature ones. To get to room temperature it'd be 5.5x faster than the low temp ones, so perhaps is it possible?
@@Mandragara I have no idea, I just don't think that super conductors are some sort of panacea anyhow. I remember when the first high temperature superconductors came out and everybody was excited,but then I became an electrical engineer, and it's not anywhere near as exciting. The "news" media completely misinformed the public about the uses. The idea we were sold on were magnets that could carry infinite current - well - if that was possible, it would be revolutionary - but it's not true, you get enough electrons flowing and the superconductivity ends. Since I got into my 20's I realized that nearly everything reported by a reporter is false, they either have no idea what they are talking about, or they are actively lying.
@@fuzzywzhe The issue with high temperature superconductors is they are typically exotic ceramics that are unworkable into wire etc. MRI machines etc still use metal wires because metal is workable.
Room temperature superconductors are almost certainly possible, as highly pressurized gasses though. The pressures required might require some pretty novel containers.
Clearly the solution is to sneak into the room temperature room (the one used to define room temperature, much like the old physical kilogram), turn the thermostat to -200° C, and boom! Now you’ve got tons of room temperature superconductors!
Oh Young One, if only were it that simple. See the room temperature room is a sacred place, no change can be made there. If you disagree with me, I see no other option then to challenge you to the Sun Chamber...
I wonder if one could replicate it using tau or muons not electrons, as their greater mass could potentially mean it's harder to bump it to higher energy state? I know the decay is the problem, but at least it's a different problem xD
Just a small correction (and feel free to correct me if I misunderstood something): At 5:10 it's mentioned that "Magnetic fields induce electric current" which in itself is not really true, yes it happens in superconductors, but that is a very special case, and this can not be stated generally. Imagine if you put a slab of copper on a magnet, based on this statement there should be currents flowing in the copper block at any time, basically heating up the copper, which we do not experience... The proper statement is that CHANGING magnetic fields induce currents and there are really cool experiments for that, for example when you drop a magnet in a copper tube it falls slower than dropping it in a plastic tube, which is related to the 3rd rule (since a moving magnet makes a changing magnetic field, it induces currents in the tube, which has an opposing magnetic field) Also superconductivity is usually claimed to be "zero resistance", but it is more than that. The main point of superconductivity is the Meissner-effect, and the zero resistance is just an extra thing. Imagine if you place a "superconductor" above Tc on a magnet, then you start cooling it down below Tc. If "superconductivity" only meant zero resistance, then nothing would happen to the magnetic field inside the "superconductor", since the magnetic field is not changing so there would be no current induced. But in reality we see that the magnetic field is expelled, so superconductivity is MORE than simply 0 resistance. Regarding this just follow up on the London model, even they realized that simply having 0 resistance would lead to CONSTANT (not necessarily zero) or exponentially decaying magnetic field. They arbitrarily modified their equations to also include the expelled magnetic field, since this was not a direct consequence of the 0 resistance.
This comment, which actually contributed something meaningful, now has 10 upvotes. All comments here having hundreds of upvotes provide absolutely nothing (except attempts at highschool-level humor). Why is that?
@peterkovacs5983 can you elaborate more on the issue with the mechanism presented? If the electrons are fully free to move, and have some initial velocity from random thermal motion, then even a constant magnetic field will cause a Lorenz force and the electrons will drift in helices towards the surfaces perpendicular to the field. There they will keep eddying about and oppose the magnetic field, until B=0 inside. Although I'm not totally clear in this model what keeps the electron eddies on the surface, as there's no electric field or magnetic field gradient.
Well, LK 99 seems to be as superconducting as the modmRNA shots are safe and effective. And, what people are missing, is that a room temperature superconducting material - if such at all - might contain very rare/precious components, and its usage thus being limited to quantum electronics
I have followed all the high-temperature superconductor news since it broke in the mid-1980s. Cool stories. Some of the things we do with lower-temperature superconductors may not be possible at higher temperatures superconductors because of the very nature of the material that allows for high-temperature phenomena. Still. I am always an optimist.
well there are the high pressure super conductors too. So I imagine its a macro mechanical effect effecting various quantum phemonma, and mechanical means we absolutly can, its just... finding what the quantum recipie for success is.
@@bigsmall246 the point isnt the enviorment of what we have, but the simularities between the multiple enviroments we have Both high pressure and low tempuratures have a mechanical property of bringing atoms and electrons closer together. With that knoweledge its a question of how to design the crystal desired under the conditions required. Although even if high pressures are always going to be a requirement that still allows for things like extreme interferance fits, and pressure chambers to provide the pressure long term, and mixing and matching mechinisms I.E. chilled but not liquid nitrogen, and just tens of bar of pressure, both perfectly reasonable for far more wide scale use
This channel has been making me, a stupid ape who recently got defeated by a child proof bottle, feel like I understand complex topics on physics for years. It's the best.
@@TheUntioI believe they're called "child proof" because children don't have access to power tools. I've never had trouble getting into a child proof medicine bottle with a tablesaw. 😁
I'm sure this gets said a lot, but can I just point out how great the animations are for these videos? Your graphics team really goes above and beyond to make them look awesome while still being very informative.
Quick correction. Flux pinning is actually when fluxons in a type 2 Superconductor are prevented from moving. Fluxons can move via Lorentz forces which adds some resistance.
Yea, this episode wasn’t super informative, superconducting materials won’t improve our computers much because 95% of the losses are in semiconductors and not traces or inductors. That also needs a correction.
@@hugegamer5988 You can replace the semiconductors with superconducting materials. If you want to know more there's a wikipedia article "superconducting computing" about it.
@@DeepeningTheListening sure, but you would have to redesign everything from the ground up with technology we can’t even demonstrate in a lab much less actually make. Literally 50-100 years away and unlikely in our lifetimes even if a cheap room temperature superconductor was invented today. Its not going to “over lock our computers without overheating”.
Yea it would clarify a lot if they had put some real life examples in - e.g. that you have to cool a type 2 SC inside the magnetic field to "freeze it in" and compare Type 1 and 2 via the behavior e.g. in an out-side looping.
16:37 Not so sure about that. The way the paper was phrased was already very sensational and claimed a massive breakthrough without checking their results well. The media hype just followed, but the original paper was clumsy and such a potentially massive breakthrough should not have been pushed to pre print at that stage.
and also initially published without the knowledge of two of the named authors, by someone who no longer worked at the institution where the research took place. 'twas a rum affair
The Meissner effect is due to macroscopic skin current not vortices. If a material's Cooper pairs can remain coherent around a vortex whose radius is determined by the London penetration depth, then that material is Type II and can sustain magnetic vortices on its interior; otherwise, attempts to form vortices collapse and the material is Type I. Flux pinning and vortex formation are entirely distinct. Type II superconductors need NOT have pinning centers. Type II superconductor materials with impurities, stress fractures, and/or topological 'defects' arrange their vortices so that the non-superconducting vortex cores occupy the locations of these material anomalies; this leaves the best superconducting volume to conduct the persistent vortex current. The attraction between these anomalies and a vortex is "vortex pinning."
I am not sure about this. From experiments that I have seen vortexes do not occupy any predefined location rather as they number depends on the magnetic field (due to them having a single state quantized value). Based on the number to vortexes automatically form a pseudo-crystal structure like lattice that maximises the distance between them. Rather than material impurities this lattice dictates where vortexes are located. Also within the vortex superconductivity is lost so in a way they do provide their own defect
Minor correction for that Critical Temp vs Year chart around 14 min: the FeSe is labeled "LM", but that should be "ML", as the material was a MonoLayer, rather than a bulk semiconductor. Also, a major problem with the LK99 paper was they didn't actually post a specific procedure. They said they combined Pb2(SO4)O + Cu3P to make Pb9Cu(PO4)6O, but there's no stoichiometry (ie, the weights of the two ingredients) to do that reaction without massive leftover impurities, which they never address. Replications just mixed them in equal proportion or equimolar, but the original paper never specified that.
What was considered the final nail was when a team used molecular vapor epitaxy to produce the crytal excatly as despribed rather then try to follow the paper and they found no superconductive properties. That is not to discredit the idea that some undesired side products could have been superconductive, there was wide dissagreement between labs and often little bits of possibly very intresting behaviours popping up super conductor or not But it wasnt LK-99 doing it.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2 I think there might be some interesting properties to be had in the impurities, which I didn't see much investigation of. The main analytical method they used in the LK99 paper was XRay Diffraction, which would only pick up crystalline compounds. It wouldn't surprise me if lead-doped nonstoichiometric copper sulfide was amorphous. The electronic structure of copper sulfide(s) is actually pretty unusual, with both copper and sulfur being in mixed valences, depending on the stoichiometry.
@@Nuovoswiss I am gald I am not the only one who thought there might be intresting properties in the impurities. Lead doped copper sulfieds is defenitly pushing my off hand metallurgical and chemistry knoweldge but it does *seem* like a compound that would be amorphious. Good point.
I'm a scientist myself and if I would replicate such an experiment I would of course contact the authors of the paper for further specification - and I would assume they did that. On another note, in the video he says that the authors of the original paper are not to blame but I think they are. It is pretty bad, from the methodology to the writing. I also believe that they themselves were actively promoting it to the sensationalist press.
One important thing is that helium cooled superconductors are usually just a piece of metal that you can make into whatever shape you want and does not break. Nitrogen cooled is usually ceramic stuff, brittle, fragile and hard to make in a desired shape. No matter how cheaper liquid nitrogen is, serious applications still use old school helium cooling.
Couldn't we make a superconductive powder, put it in a metal tube, form it in the desired shape? It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe good enough for many applications? Maybe fill the gaps between the grains with some metal, after forming? (Is that possible?)
@@happygimp0 The entire idea of using superconductors is that you need it to be perfect, so no. If “good enough” works then you don’t need a superconductor.
@@alphahex99 Depends on the application. Yes, you may don't "need" a superconductor but a much lower resistance than we currently have can open a lot of applications.
For some reason, this reminded me of a high school teacher that I had (not in any science class) who thought that the lights in his classroom turning on was because it took the electricity so long to get to his room. Florescent lights... The only thing that I remember learning from that class is that teachers aren't infallible.
I mean, if we combine MRI, X-Ray Crystallography, and a few other scanning methods, with 3D tools such as Blender and a 3D printer, we couod technically make a Replicator. Just saying. And that's not even a fiction statement, I mean factually, here irl.
except for building control consoles that do not have high power conduits inside them, ready to burn that poor technician to death at the first malfunction
Tricky little thing. Like trying to follow the information radiated out from the horizon wall to maybe the containment wall of the universe, in the Hawking hologram realm. Love the show guys even though you cause so much painful interference (and some of it coherent) in my non-super conducting brain. Keep up the hard work digging for all the solutions!
Thanks a lot for the overview. I work at a place that uses superconducting magnets all the time and i'm grateful to have some clues to start picturing what happens with this phenomenon.
Thank you for this video. My students have been asking about LK99 for a while; now I have a video to share instead of prepping a whole class/semester on it.
I really enjoyed watching your video and I wanted to thank you for sharing it. I have a suggestion regarding the element used in the illustration throughout the video. Instead of using iron (Fe), it would have been better to use a classical conducting metal like copper (Cu) or even a superconducting metal such as niobium (Nb) or lead (Pb) to illustrate how electrons flow inside a superconductor. The reason for this is that Fe is a ferromagnetic metal, and according to the BCS theory, for superconductivity to form, the pairs of electrons need to have opposite spins, which is more difficult to achieve with ferromagnetic metals. Thank you!
Also, Matt... I've haven't had a chance to keep up with your videos recently (life, work, etc) but I love just listening while I'm at work doing stuff. I would love to sit in on one of your lectures! Thank you 😺😻👍
Even though a superconductor has zero resistance, is there a limit on how much current could flow through a superconductor? Surely you can't have an infinite amount of current (electrons) in a finite volume, right?
I would expect so, in the video he mentioned that above a certain magnetic field, the effect breaks, so intuitively I expect electricity to behave the same way.
For superconductors the image of electrons "flowing" breaks down and instead you deal with quantum effects. I don't understand much past that. There is some limit, but it's absolutely absurd. CERN uses super conducting cables not much beefier than the wiring you might use for a washing machine circuit, but it's able to take 12.5kA of current. There's a picture of it next to some standard copper cabling rated to the same current on the Wikipedia page for superconductivity.
that would mean you'd need infinite speed of electron movement also, since nuclear forces will keep the electrons from being infitinitely close to each other. There'd be a limit on current based on size of the superconductor, I'd imagine.
nvm electrons don't feel strong force. theoretically, yes then. Of course, we wouldn't be able to garner anything from accomplishing such a thing I don't think lol
I kinda agree it would be nice to have. Not the best, just nice. However some deep instinct in me gets triggered and I can't think that's just making nitrogen the next oil market. And sure, I know it's abundant… but special treatment might be necessary, on which case corporations will be more than happy to help you.
The trouble with current high temperature superconductors is they're brittle so cannot be stretched into useful wires. Even if we manage room temperature superconductors their use will be limited unless we can do this.
The problem with Cooper pairs in SC is, they fall apart at the transition temperature. It is simply a matter of kT-energy, that overwhelms the electron binding energy (Details see Landau-model). And these temperatures are quite low - even in high temperature SC. The better way is to use topological insulators - vulgo super-insulators. They show a band-gap like a semiconductor but do not follow the Shockley equation. the best material we have found yet is nano-bismuth with a particle size of about 9nm. These can be harvested from a simple precipitation process from a cation exchange reaction. In such a material, Cooper pairs are confined with topology. Transition temperature is about 63.5°C, Everybody can verify this.
@@mehrdadsalehimehr9849 Within a plate capacitor (homogenous E-field), nBi can withstand a current density of about j=1.2A/mm² @ 63°C (just below transition temperature). This doesn't sound much, but when you take in account, topological insulators can be used as capacitors with very high energy density due to their high relative dielectric constant (4.1E6), loss factor and self-discharge rate zero, a capacitor with an area of 10x10cm can withstand juicy 12kA.
@15:12 THANK YOU! I had to do a thorough research paper on that when I was getting my BS in physics. According to BCS theory, high-temperature superconductivity shouldn't be possible: high-temperature superconductors likely operate under a completely different principle than the original superconductors that were predicted, one that we still don't understand. So, it's entirely possible that room temperature superconductivity can happen... but we honestly have no idea, since we don't understand the fundamental underlying mechanism of the high-temp superconductors in the first place.
I'm a little confused on how cooper pairs are allowed to occupy the same quantum state, when their component electrons aren't? I would think that any given quantum state of a cooper pair would correspond to a particular pair of quantum states for it's component electrons, and those component electrons would still not be allowed to have the same quantum state as electrons in another cooper pair
I don't fully understand it but it's analogous to how a hydrogen atom is electrically neutral despite it's component electron and proton each having a distinct electric charge. Composite bosons show up in a lot of places though including semiconductors.
@@Wolfpack753 Well, sure, but a hydrogen atom is only electrically neutral from afar, those electrons still electrostatically repel other, nearby molecules, which is why macroscopic stuff doesn't pass through each other
It's the same as regular BE condensates with supercooled He, the electrons/protons in the He are all fermions but each He is individually a boson. But taking the wave function of each He individually, you will find that the electrons are antisymmetric with particle exchange (fermionic). QM is kinda all just about a choice of basis for what you want to study; BCS theory is just like "assuming that electrons pair up like this in good approximation (justification for why, etc.), here's the predicted results". You could of course choose a different basis treating each electron individually and solve for the entire solid (in which the electrons would of course be fermionic), but it's too expensive to model things that way so you choose a better starting point.
The trick is that while Cooper pairs are a combination of quantum states, this combination is more limited than the whole array of states the electrons can have individually. Specifically this limits how the linked pair can exchange energy with their environment. Consider a plasma; the particles there are free and charged and can thus absorb and emit any energy of electromagnetic radiation. Plasma is opaque to all frequencies of EM. But when the particles cool and form atoms they become more ordered and linked. An electron's state becomes linked to all those in its atom and limited to a specific set of energy levels. At that point the frequencies of photons it can interact with it reduced from infinite to just a few specific ones. The matter goes from opaque to mostly transparent to EM. Each electron in each atom IS just a combination of quantum states, ones that could occur in the plasma at any time. But the links between various particles' states mean that any one particle CANNOT arbitrarily change state. Cannot arbitrarily change energy. In a superconductor Cooper pairs are very limited in how they can exchange energy, since BOTH electrons must be involved and BOTH states must change together. They behave as they do not because they are bosons, OR because they're in a low energy state. The single most important factor is that they're limited. That they can't change energy as easily or in as many ways as individual, unlinked electrons.
I got to pay with one of those “race tracks” at KTH in Stockholm. As I remember it it was an Ytterbium-based Type II superconductor doused in liquid nitrogen and wrapped in scotch tape for extra insulation. The magnet track was probably commercial-grade Neodymium magnets.
Wonder if you could create Muon cooper pairs? They would produce a more massive quasi-particle boson which would probably require a much higher energy 'jiggle' to kick it up out of the low energy state.
So to the opening question: "We don't know yet" and 15:32 ... "There are different stories for how the Cooper-pairs form and a single mechanism hasn't been settled on yet. That means it's very difficult to know the maximum temperature for which superconductivity is possible". So the video could have been 10 seconds long 😉
Thanks for covering this! LK-99 craze had me baffled for couple of reasons. One only needed to do moderate digging to find out that their claim was bogus. Naturally, I don't mean mass media, but many researchers like Sabine Hossenfelder and channels like Sixty Symbols covered it in sufficient detail to give you a more complete picture. That was a nice reminder for me to always go for multiple sources. Bottom line is that the original paper uploaded to arxiv was ridden with mistakes in methodology. If one read it, or even just quickly looked over, one would have realized how many red flags there were. Infamous chart scaling to start off with. Monstrous claims of impact of their discovery. Lack of reputable measurements. Weird story behind their Quantum Research Center etc. Finally, zero successful replications! Let's also not forget that LHC only uses high temperature superconductors in current leads as they are ceramics immensely difficult to shape into wires useful in industrial applications. So yeah, it would nice to have those, but changing the world is, uhm, a bit much you could say :D
Scientists working on this kind of research, please keep up the good work, even though this wasn't a success . It opened up a lot of eyes to what this kind of a breakthrough would mean for the whole of mankind.
What happens to the levitation in space? For example if gravity isnt pulling the superconductor towards or away from the magnet... or is the flux so much stronger than gravity, such that gravity is completely irrelevant?
Magnetic levitation is actually coupling or locking. The levitating object can be manipulated and "sticks" in whatever orientation it's in when you stop pushing on it. In freefall it would do the same. Holding it in place at whatever distance and orientation you left it in.
Guys check your audio pipeline, there was a joke in the other video that the host sounds ai-generated, but it's actually true. Sounds modulated, poorly resampled.
There's pretty much zero reverb in the audio, which sounds very off. It pretty much bothered me too much to watch the entire video lol. Check the video before this one and the difference is obvious.
The problem lies not solely on the media. The (now debunked) pre-print (which is how science should work) also included a statement that said "we are confident this discovery will change the world". I am sure this was a well-spirited statement, but it delves in the realm of pretentiousness and, in the worst case scenario, the realm of unnecessary precipitous remarks.
It's not uncommon for researchers to put out exaggerated sensational claims for generating attention and attracting investors. I understand why it can happen but it's probably counterproductive to the scientific enterprise as a whole. Or perhaps they got a little too excited with their preliminary findings and jumped the gun. Who knows?
The scientists behind "Cold fusion" has something real. They were just slandered in the media because scientists were not *usually* able to reproduce the effect. Not "usually", but there was something real there.
I've never hear of RTSC being any number of years away, just something that will probably happen soonish. Very much like graphene/carbon nanotubes, though I have heard of graphene being 10-15 years away. Grapheme and carbon nanotubes ate confirmed to exist though, so that's more of a question of large-scale production.
Before I even watch the video, my prediction is: No, but they need to be under obscene amounts of pressure to work at room temperature or something similar which makes them just as impractical or more than conventional liquid helium cooled super conductors
I don't think so. There should be configurations of molecules, that are bound in a way that creates the correct properties. It's like saying 2 Northpoles of magnets can never stick together. Well that is untrue, because I can superglue them together. I just redefined the problem and made a different approach. The same with super conductivity. In principle yes it shouldn't work in anything than very low temps. But that doesn't mean I can't drill holes into the thing and make pipelines for the electrons to flow effortlessly. I'm just using metaphors, but I'm confident there should be viable solutions to the room temp superconductor.
@@livinlicious I think no small part of the issue is faster quantum decoherence at high temperatures because all superconductivity relies on cooper pairs of electrons that are entangled such that the pair acts like a boson and can form a superfluid. the first superconductors that only work right near absolute zero, which we really understand, work because the electrons are bound into pairs by the harmonic oscillation of the atomic nuclei. Cuprate superconductors like YBCO work at higher temperatures because they have a stronger pairing mechanism that isn't definitively understood yet. High pressure helps because it suppresses thermal motion. I think room temperature and pressure superconductivity might require some new physics. haven't watched the video yet, so I'll see what Matt says.
I gave an informative speech about superconductors and the "recently" discovered ceramic superconductors in my high school speech class--in 1987. I've been interested in superconductivity ever since.
What makes me sad a bit is that how this story LK-99 unfolded can make researchers hesitate to publish their discoveries. It's natural to be wrong sometimes and media just made them monsters.
These researchers, by everything I've heard, had lots of ethical problems before this paper was ever published. Proper researchers should fear the peer review process more than publishing their work. This is why peer review exists, to catch papers like these.
@@Phriedah ok, then, that changes the perspective a bit. Trust me, I've seen some terrible papers, especially in analysis part, so I'm not against peer review. The heck, some of them made their way to media and didn't receive half of the backlash those researches did, but I think I prefer it this way than not knowing about those observations at all because there was no paper in the first place.
It does highlight how peer works and the problems of hyping up something before it is reviewed. The sad part is by the time the peer review process is done the media has moved on to the next story and never retracts the articles or publishes as retraction. This can leave a plethora of news articles that are factually incorrect that people can still think are true. Much like the vaccine link to autism paper, that was retracted and thoroughly discredited, but still has news articles that reference it as a valid proven study. That’s why we need more science education and content so that we have a better understanding of the science around us.
@@PhriedahAre you sure you're thinking of the right one? Ranga P. Dias has been in the public eye for what is starting to look like fraudulent claims about a superconductor and has a history of them, but he isn't part of the team that made LK99. Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon (The L and K of LK99) don't have that much history.
It most likely is not impossible, but it will require advances in materials manufacturing able to get the crystal structure exactly right in order to get the conduction correct
yeah seems like the fusion tokamak/stellerator thing! i bet we could make some "material" that has these electron funneling vortices baked into them, instead of created/brute-forced by "flow" and cold temperatures!
@@Laff700 indeed, we'd probably need to find an Ideal Glass to make a room temp superconductor (or at least find out what the maximum temp for superconductivity is). It's no surprise to me that all these higher-temp superconductors are ceramics.
Metastable metallic hydrogen (if it exists) has been proposed as a likely room temperature semiconductor. It's very interesting to read about for more reasons than only that
Can someone enlighten me as to the actual use of a non-malleable, metal-ceramic super-conductor? It seems to me that we have lN2-temperature, ceramic super-conductors which have almost no utility already. Where does increasing the critical pressure and critical temperature, without the necessary physical properties of the material actually get us?
They're already used in MRI and NMR machines, along with particle accelerators. Mostly used today to generate extremely powerful magnetic fields. Flexibility is not an issue, a glass bottle doesn't bend and breaks easily but a fiberglass cloth can be easily folded, yet both are made from glass.
Currently it's a bit risky investing in developing any one superconductor. Since there are constant improvements, if you spent a decade working on something, all your work might be undone by developments in that time. As such the current lack of utility isn't the best measure. As such the issue is a measure of cost. Room temperature would require little or no cooling, which would be a significant savings. That could be enough to tip the balance for certain applications. (For example transmission lines are wires, but buried rods of material could also be made to work, IF its cheap enough.) Without a cheap, easily fabricated metallic HTSC that can take a decent current applications will always be more limited. I mean we don't use silver and gold wires for everything despite their superior lack of resistance. But there's a lot of potential, even now for utilizing superconductors. The question is how close to a dream material we can get. If it's good enough we'll change how we use conductors to take advantage of it.
It's amazing that we somehow ate at the same point as decades ago, not fully understanding what's happening with superconductors (high temperature) perhaps when we find out new theory we can pursuit the final go of a room temperature superconducter
Could you have closer to room temperature superconductivity with super heavy elements that we haven't yet been able to synthesize and find a "stable" state for? My postulation is that having the electrons so far out due to the need for a bigger electron shell radius would reduce the resistance between electrons since they aren't held to the atom as stringently. Right?
The big issue isn't binding to atoms, elements like rubidium hold their electrons incredibly weakly, while those like seaborgium should hold them very tightly, forming incredibly tough metals. The trick instead is having electrons that are limited, ones that have no choice but to form, and stay in, Cooper-like pairs.This is why so many ceramics make the list.Electrons need to be free to move, but not so free they can bump into everything.
Having weakly bound electrons is very good for having *regular* conductors.All metals are elements that have weakly bound electrons, and the heavier an element is, the more metallic it tends to be. Metals can be a billion times more conductive than light elements like sulfur. I can confidently say most superheavy elements would beat the conductivity of phosphorous a million times over. Metals are nearly perfect conductors. But not perfect. Electrons moving through them face a situation like trying to walk through a crowd at a concert. People keep bumping into one another, knocking each other around. Electrons in metals, even the 'best' metals, keep hitting atoms and other electrons, getting shaken around and turning their energy into heat. At low temperatures the atoms don't move. Like a crowd of people standing in place, it's easier to walk through them. In superconductors electrons can 'run through' the gaps between atoms and not hit anything. High temperate superconductors seem to work by 'locking' the atoms in place (Which is why so many are ceramics.) If the atoms can't move about randomly,t hey can't disrupt the electrons as they move. And that's the important part, not just having electrons that can move, but electrons that won't be messed with AS they move.
@@garethdean6382 So what you're saying is that beyond even a few degrees Kelvin there's just too much chaos to make it possible? What if the element was so heavy that it's basically the theoretical limit for an element since any heavier and you would have to rely on pressures from something like an extremely dense star core? Would the elements be far enough apart then because there are so few of them due to the sheer amount of positive charge, or would there still be just too many atoms causing chaos for the system to work like a superconductor?
If it's hard to get room temperature super conductors maybe we should try the other way around and adjust the room temperature. Just set it to high, and use high temperature superconductors that we have working today.
I like how even if room temperature superconductors that are cheap were a thing we would still need to use regular conductors for heating things up like in resistive electrical heaters and in toasters, toastie makers, and those portable electrical toasting ovens.
I think you're being awfully generous to the research team by blaming it all on the media. Not only was there a lack of due diligence before publishing, what was published was very suspicious. In particular, the very poor resolution on the critical graph that was supposed to show zero resistance.
Thunderfoot did a great video on this. He points out that high temperature superconductors do exist and have for decades. They are still cooled well below freezing but much warmer than super conductors commonly used in industry. There are other problems with these high temperature superconductors. Namely they are usually ceramics that cannot be easily made into coils and they have a relatively small current limit before they loose superconductivity.
One major breakthrough would be lossless energy transport over long distances - you could turn the Sahara into a giant solar generator and feed the world.
All this could mean that civilizations that exist on lower-temperature planets could be far more advanced than ours because they've come into contact with superconductivity far earlier and more easily.
Since the first time I heard about the superconductive material and then saw how only half of it was floating, I instantly knew there had to be some impurities in the sample and that’s exactly what happened. Technically another hoax.
Asking "is this what we think it is?" after making what looks like an amazing discovery is how science works. The answer being "no" doesn't make it a hoax.
@@Bassotronics"Hoax" is always intentional. Just being wrong doesn't make it a hoax and they were invested in it with a patent application and a scramble for credit. It's pretty clear looking over everything that the people involved believed it was one.
Can you explain how cooper pairs (or, bosonic quasiparticles in general) can occupy the same states without breaking physics for the fermions that are still in the system? If two cooper pairs have the same energy, what about the individual electrons?
@@KastorFlux It's not odd at all, because fundamentally the electrons are described by spin 1/2 spinors... What I want to see is a derivation of why coupling two spinors into a bosonic state results in degenerate energy states. You're the one strawmanning here.
Cooper pairs will act bosonic, but only to a point. You cannot, for example, stack' an indefinite number of them in the same volume as you can with photons because their constituent particles will interact. In a sense there's a scale below which the bosonic behavior will disappear. We can see this with, say, atoms, which display different properties on the atomic scale compared to what a particle probing the nuclear scale would see. So the electrons in identical Cooper pairs will have the same energy level -and as such will not be able to occupy the same space, making the behavior of such pairs different from a 'true' boson but also different from isolated electrons. Superconductivity arises more from how limited the interaction of Cooper pairs is, rather than anything involving bosons. They don't even need to be in the same energy state;it's the lack of mechanisms to make them *change* states that allows their motion to be unimpeded. Forming pairs is just the only mechanism that will limit them severely enough.
I'm imagining a schoolkid in 2123 learning about the 3 types of superconductors, low-temperature, high-temperature and room temperature. Then they ask why 'high temperature' is cooler than room temperature, then the teacher explains it's historical terminology and everyone groans
Yeah, high-temperature means liquid nitrogen temp or higher
Room temperature superconductors probably won't be made in our lifetime, or ever.
Basically it requires a crystal structure that doesn't vibrate because of Brownian motion in my opinion, and I can certainly be wrong. Basically, it requires electrons to be able to move without bumping into atoms. You can do this at extremely low temperatures when the atoms are still, but if you send too many electrons through, it will breakdown the flow.
I don't think this is possible as actual room temperature. LK99 was an error, or a fraud.
@@fuzzywzhe Average velocity is proportional to square root of temperature, so current high temp superconductors' atoms are vibrating at a speed approx 4 times faster than low temperature ones. To get to room temperature it'd be 5.5x faster than the low temp ones, so perhaps is it possible?
@@Mandragara I have no idea, I just don't think that super conductors are some sort of panacea anyhow.
I remember when the first high temperature superconductors came out and everybody was excited,but then I became an electrical engineer, and it's not anywhere near as exciting.
The "news" media completely misinformed the public about the uses. The idea we were sold on were magnets that could carry infinite current - well - if that was possible, it would be revolutionary - but it's not true, you get enough electrons flowing and the superconductivity ends.
Since I got into my 20's I realized that nearly everything reported by a reporter is false, they either have no idea what they are talking about, or they are actively lying.
@@fuzzywzhe The issue with high temperature superconductors is they are typically exotic ceramics that are unworkable into wire etc. MRI machines etc still use metal wires because metal is workable.
one of the few channels who can discuss a question for 15 minutes only to end with "we have no idea" and still make it incredibly worth watching
Room temperature superconductors are almost certainly possible, as highly pressurized gasses though. The pressures required might require some pretty novel containers.
Clearly the solution is to sneak into the room temperature room (the one used to define room temperature, much like the old physical kilogram), turn the thermostat to -200° C, and boom! Now you’ve got tons of room temperature superconductors!
For those unfamiliar with this room ruclips.net/video/VxxYqE4Gil8/видео.html
Or, nuclear winter!
Oh Young One, if only were it that simple. See the room temperature room is a sacred place, no change can be made there. If you disagree with me, I see no other option then to challenge you to the Sun Chamber...
It's a high crime in France to adjust the thermostat in the Température Ambiante.
@@SP-ny1fk Pretty sure that wouldn’t get cold enough. But maybe, if we boosted earth out of the solar system in the direction of the boomerang nebula…
Can someone please win another Nobel prize for figuring out how high temperature superconductors work? Cool, thanks a bunch!
Too bad, I'm only interested in a Turing Award, but maybe somehow that might be useful to get one.
That would actually be Nobel prize worthy, to be fair
brb
I wonder if one could replicate it using tau or muons not electrons, as their greater mass could potentially mean it's harder to bump it to higher energy state? I know the decay is the problem, but at least it's a different problem xD
On it
Just a small correction (and feel free to correct me if I misunderstood something):
At 5:10 it's mentioned that "Magnetic fields induce electric current" which in itself is not really true, yes it happens in superconductors, but that is a very special case, and this can not be stated generally. Imagine if you put a slab of copper on a magnet, based on this statement there should be currents flowing in the copper block at any time, basically heating up the copper, which we do not experience...
The proper statement is that CHANGING magnetic fields induce currents and there are really cool experiments for that, for example when you drop a magnet in a copper tube it falls slower than dropping it in a plastic tube, which is related to the 3rd rule (since a moving magnet makes a changing magnetic field, it induces currents in the tube, which has an opposing magnetic field)
Also superconductivity is usually claimed to be "zero resistance", but it is more than that. The main point of superconductivity is the Meissner-effect, and the zero resistance is just an extra thing. Imagine if you place a "superconductor" above Tc on a magnet, then you start cooling it down below Tc. If "superconductivity" only meant zero resistance, then nothing would happen to the magnetic field inside the "superconductor", since the magnetic field is not changing so there would be no current induced. But in reality we see that the magnetic field is expelled, so superconductivity is MORE than simply 0 resistance. Regarding this just follow up on the London model, even they realized that simply having 0 resistance would lead to CONSTANT (not necessarily zero) or exponentially decaying magnetic field. They arbitrarily modified their equations to also include the expelled magnetic field, since this was not a direct consequence of the 0 resistance.
This guy superconducts
This guy is the goat(se)
This comment, which actually contributed something meaningful, now has 10 upvotes. All comments here having hundreds of upvotes provide absolutely nothing (except attempts at highschool-level humor).
Why is that?
@gewinnste the audience isn't educated enough on the subject to know whether or not to support this comment lol
@peterkovacs5983 can you elaborate more on the issue with the mechanism presented? If the electrons are fully free to move, and have some initial velocity from random thermal motion, then even a constant magnetic field will cause a Lorenz force and the electrons will drift in helices towards the surfaces perpendicular to the field. There they will keep eddying about and oppose the magnetic field, until B=0 inside. Although I'm not totally clear in this model what keeps the electron eddies on the surface, as there's no electric field or magnetic field gradient.
Electron: “I will resist you with my last ounce of strength.”
Superconductor: “Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile.”
Except when Bc = T
Meissner would like to have a word with you lol
😁
Epic!!...this made my day
Quantum Mechanics: "You shall not pass"
If LK 99 can trick the research team, maybe it can trick the cars to levitate on superhighways
“But LK 99, you’re not a superconductor!”
“I know that, and you know that, but this car looks pretty stupid!”
If you watch the videos of LK99, it doesn't really fully levitate. If you put it into a car.... one end would be dragging on the ground.
@@laurendoe168 A 50% levitating car then! (also known as a crab bicycle)
i tried to trick a car once crossing the street it just ran me over so not a good idea from my experience
Well, LK 99 seems to be as superconducting as the modmRNA shots are safe and effective. And, what people are missing, is that a room temperature superconducting material - if such at all - might contain very rare/precious components, and its usage thus being limited to quantum electronics
I have followed all the high-temperature superconductor news since it broke in the mid-1980s. Cool stories. Some of the things we do with lower-temperature superconductors may not be possible at higher temperatures superconductors because of the very nature of the material that allows for high-temperature phenomena. Still. I am always an optimist.
Doesn’t stop MIT’s SPARC reactor concept from trying to make ceramic YBCO wires.
well there are the high pressure super conductors too.
So I imagine its a macro mechanical effect effecting various quantum phemonma, and mechanical means we absolutly can, its just... finding what the quantum recipie for success is.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2it's even harder to maintain high pressures than it is to maintain low temperatures...
Even if we found a 0c superconductor it's change a bunch
@@bigsmall246 the point isnt the enviorment of what we have, but the simularities between the multiple enviroments we have
Both high pressure and low tempuratures have a mechanical property of bringing atoms and electrons closer together.
With that knoweledge its a question of how to design the crystal desired under the conditions required.
Although even if high pressures are always going to be a requirement that still allows for things like extreme interferance fits, and pressure chambers to provide the pressure long term, and mixing and matching mechinisms I.E. chilled but not liquid nitrogen, and just tens of bar of pressure, both perfectly reasonable for far more wide scale use
The animations in this are incredible! This is the first time I’ve had an intuitive understanding of flux pinning. Super cool!
This channel has been making me, a stupid ape who recently got defeated by a child proof bottle, feel like I understand complex topics on physics for years. It's the best.
@@TheUntioI believe they're called "child proof" because children don't have access to power tools. I've never had trouble getting into a child proof medicine bottle with a tablesaw. 😁
I'm sure this gets said a lot, but can I just point out how great the animations are for these videos? Your graphics team really goes above and beyond to make them look awesome while still being very informative.
Quick correction. Flux pinning is actually when fluxons in a type 2 Superconductor are prevented from moving. Fluxons can move via Lorentz forces which adds some resistance.
Flux flow resistivity lets gooo
Yea, this episode wasn’t super informative, superconducting materials won’t improve our computers much because 95% of the losses are in semiconductors and not traces or inductors. That also needs a correction.
@@hugegamer5988 You can replace the semiconductors with superconducting materials. If you want to know more there's a wikipedia article "superconducting computing" about it.
@@DeepeningTheListening sure, but you would have to redesign everything from the ground up with technology we can’t even demonstrate in a lab much less actually make. Literally 50-100 years away and unlikely in our lifetimes even if a cheap room temperature superconductor was invented today. Its not going to “over lock our computers without overheating”.
Yea it would clarify a lot if they had put some real life examples in - e.g. that you have to cool a type 2 SC inside the magnetic field to "freeze it in" and compare Type 1 and 2 via the behavior e.g. in an out-side looping.
16:37 Not so sure about that. The way the paper was phrased was already very sensational and claimed a massive breakthrough without checking their results well.
The media hype just followed, but the original paper was clumsy and such a potentially massive breakthrough should not have been pushed to pre print at that stage.
It's a scam.
and also initially published without the knowledge of two of the named authors, by someone who no longer worked at the institution where the research took place. 'twas a rum affair
@@Marin3r101Nah, it's a bad work.
Did you read the original Korean paper? Does it has the same sensational phrases as the English one?
The Meissner effect is due to macroscopic skin current not vortices. If a material's Cooper pairs can remain coherent around a vortex whose radius is determined by the London penetration depth, then that material is Type II and can sustain magnetic vortices on its interior; otherwise, attempts to form vortices collapse and the material is Type I. Flux pinning and vortex formation are entirely distinct. Type II superconductors need NOT have pinning centers. Type II superconductor materials with impurities, stress fractures, and/or topological 'defects' arrange their vortices so that the non-superconducting vortex cores occupy the locations of these material anomalies; this leaves the best superconducting volume to conduct the persistent vortex current. The attraction between these anomalies and a vortex is "vortex pinning."
I am not sure about this. From experiments that I have seen vortexes do not occupy any predefined location rather as they number depends on the magnetic field (due to them having a single state quantized value). Based on the number to vortexes automatically form a pseudo-crystal structure like lattice that maximises the distance between them. Rather than material impurities this lattice dictates where vortexes are located.
Also within the vortex superconductivity is lost so in a way they do provide their own defect
@@sirati9770 I won't list the thousands of peer reviewed papers that support what I have said. My Ph.D. thesis was on this topic.
@@byronwatkins2565 can you link ur thesis i'd like to read
We almost had an above room temperature superconductor, but Mr. Kent decided to become a reporter instead of a rail worker.
Ba dum tss
Perhaps we should consult Sheldon Cooper? He even has Cooper in his name
This joke really hurt my brain
@@feynstein1004 no need to consult him, just clone him many times. Then we can have cooper pairs.
@@hugegamer5988 Ba dum tss
Minor correction for that Critical Temp vs Year chart around 14 min: the FeSe is labeled "LM", but that should be "ML", as the material was a MonoLayer, rather than a bulk semiconductor.
Also, a major problem with the LK99 paper was they didn't actually post a specific procedure. They said they combined Pb2(SO4)O + Cu3P to make Pb9Cu(PO4)6O, but there's no stoichiometry (ie, the weights of the two ingredients) to do that reaction without massive leftover impurities, which they never address.
Replications just mixed them in equal proportion or equimolar, but the original paper never specified that.
What was considered the final nail was when a team used molecular vapor epitaxy to produce the crytal excatly as despribed rather then try to follow the paper and they found no superconductive properties.
That is not to discredit the idea that some undesired side products could have been superconductive, there was wide dissagreement between labs and often little bits of possibly very intresting behaviours popping up super conductor or not
But it wasnt LK-99 doing it.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2 I think there might be some interesting properties to be had in the impurities, which I didn't see much investigation of.
The main analytical method they used in the LK99 paper was XRay Diffraction, which would only pick up crystalline compounds. It wouldn't surprise me if lead-doped nonstoichiometric copper sulfide was amorphous.
The electronic structure of copper sulfide(s) is actually pretty unusual, with both copper and sulfur being in mixed valences, depending on the stoichiometry.
Yeah, he was way too kind to the scumbag scientists who released that bs
@@Nuovoswiss I am gald I am not the only one who thought there might be intresting properties in the impurities.
Lead doped copper sulfieds is defenitly pushing my off hand metallurgical and chemistry knoweldge but it does *seem* like a compound that would be amorphious. Good point.
I'm a scientist myself and if I would replicate such an experiment I would of course contact the authors of the paper for further specification - and I would assume they did that.
On another note, in the video he says that the authors of the original paper are not to blame but I think they are. It is pretty bad, from the methodology to the writing. I also believe that they themselves were actively promoting it to the sensationalist press.
One important thing is that helium cooled superconductors are usually just a piece of metal that you can make into whatever shape you want and does not break.
Nitrogen cooled is usually ceramic stuff, brittle, fragile and hard to make in a desired shape. No matter how cheaper liquid nitrogen is, serious applications still use old school helium cooling.
Couldn't we make a superconductive powder, put it in a metal tube, form it in the desired shape?
It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe good enough for many applications? Maybe fill the gaps between the grains with some metal, after forming? (Is that possible?)
@@happygimp0 The entire idea of using superconductors is that you need it to be perfect, so no. If “good enough” works then you don’t need a superconductor.
@@alphahex99 Depends on the application. Yes, you may don't "need" a superconductor but a much lower resistance than we currently have can open a lot of applications.
For some reason, this reminded me of a high school teacher that I had (not in any science class) who thought that the lights in his classroom turning on was because it took the electricity so long to get to his room. Florescent lights... The only thing that I remember learning from that class is that teachers aren't infallible.
well he's not far off, it has to do with the time needed for the electrons to get across the fluorescent bulb
And this is also why you should be skeptical when an expert in one field makes claims about another. (Looking at YOU Linus Pauling!)
Oh, nice video! The way you present the work and discoveries makes it like a mystery novel! Nice animations too!
If somehow we could combine cold fusion and warm superconductors . . . .
UNLIMITED lukewarm power!
It's a great idea until Marketing and Legal gets involved.
Running hot and cold on this idea
Yes. This is the exact technology breakthrough that we need to move forward into the future.
Red mage from 8 bit theatre might have an idea
Nothing is impossible if you watch enough Star Trek.
Building a starship console out of anything except for 97% pure explodium would be impossible, according to ST.
I was thinking the same.
But more real than sarcastically.
@@oberonpanopticon Faster than light fibre optic processing has it's kaboomy drawbacks.
I mean, if we combine MRI, X-Ray Crystallography, and a few other scanning methods, with 3D tools such as Blender and a 3D printer, we couod technically make a Replicator. Just saying. And that's not even a fiction statement, I mean factually, here irl.
except for building control consoles that do not have high power conduits inside them, ready to burn that poor technician to death at the first malfunction
Tricky little thing. Like trying to follow the information radiated out from the horizon wall to maybe the containment wall of the universe, in the Hawking hologram realm. Love the show guys even though you cause so much painful interference (and some of it coherent) in my non-super conducting brain. Keep up the hard work digging for all the solutions!
Thanks a lot for the overview. I work at a place that uses superconducting magnets all the time and i'm grateful to have some clues to start picturing what happens with this phenomenon.
What is your job friend really interested to know
I love conversations about the stuff that we don’t know.😊
Thank you for this video. My students have been asking about LK99 for a while; now I have a video to share instead of prepping a whole class/semester on it.
Are you teacher?
I think old man Joe from the local train station is a superconductor
I really enjoyed watching your video and I wanted to thank you for sharing it. I have a suggestion regarding the element used in the illustration throughout the video. Instead of using iron (Fe), it would have been better to use a classical conducting metal like copper (Cu) or even a superconducting metal such as niobium (Nb) or lead (Pb) to illustrate how electrons flow inside a superconductor. The reason for this is that Fe is a ferromagnetic metal, and according to the BCS theory, for superconductivity to form, the pairs of electrons need to have opposite spins, which is more difficult to achieve with ferromagnetic metals. Thank you!
Algorithmicly speaking, this room temperature comment should help conduct a few more views.
Thought this would bore me but I was fascinated!
room temperature superconducters would make for some amazing wheelless wheelchairs.
hmmm so... chairs?
...or floating mountains. I want to go hiking and bird watching on a floating mountain.
Also, Matt... I've haven't had a chance to keep up with your videos recently (life, work, etc) but I love just listening while I'm at work doing stuff. I would love to sit in on one of your lectures! Thank you 😺😻👍
Even though a superconductor has zero resistance, is there a limit on how much current could flow through a superconductor? Surely you can't have an infinite amount of current (electrons) in a finite volume, right?
Each superconductor has a specific current density above which the effect breaks down.
I would expect so, in the video he mentioned that above a certain magnetic field, the effect breaks, so intuitively I expect electricity to behave the same way.
For superconductors the image of electrons "flowing" breaks down and instead you deal with quantum effects. I don't understand much past that.
There is some limit, but it's absolutely absurd. CERN uses super conducting cables not much beefier than the wiring you might use for a washing machine circuit, but it's able to take 12.5kA of current. There's a picture of it next to some standard copper cabling rated to the same current on the Wikipedia page for superconductivity.
that would mean you'd need infinite speed of electron movement also, since nuclear forces will keep the electrons from being infitinitely close to each other. There'd be a limit on current based on size of the superconductor, I'd imagine.
nvm electrons don't feel strong force. theoretically, yes then. Of course, we wouldn't be able to garner anything from accomplishing such a thing I don't think lol
2:52 "It's like hot coffee! The atoms they jiggle!" - thank you Richard, one of the simplest best lessons.
A cheap superconductor that can be cooled with liquid nitrogen and be formed, drawn, sheared, milled, turned, punched, and bent would be highly useful
I kinda agree it would be nice to have. Not the best, just nice.
However some deep instinct in me gets triggered and I can't think that's just making nitrogen the next oil market. And sure, I know it's abundant… but special treatment might be necessary, on which case corporations will be more than happy to help you.
Hahahaha … that was funny 😁
I don't understand it, therefore: "MAGIC!" Your discussions never fail to fascinate.
Excellent work
The clever presentation of superconfuctivity (and superfluidity).
The trouble with current high temperature superconductors is they're brittle so cannot be stretched into useful wires. Even if we manage room temperature superconductors their use will be limited unless we can do this.
Nice review of superconductivity!
Would love to see a episode about how stimulated emissions (lasers) where theorized, and then engineered.
The problem with Cooper pairs in SC is, they fall apart at the transition temperature. It is simply a matter of kT-energy, that overwhelms the electron binding energy (Details see Landau-model). And these temperatures are quite low - even in high temperature SC. The better way is to use topological insulators - vulgo super-insulators. They show a band-gap like a semiconductor but do not follow the Shockley equation. the best material we have found yet is nano-bismuth with a particle size of about 9nm. These can be harvested from a simple precipitation process from a cation exchange reaction. In such a material, Cooper pairs are confined with topology. Transition temperature is about 63.5°C, Everybody can verify this.
That's good but how much current can it withstand?
@@mehrdadsalehimehr9849 Within a plate capacitor (homogenous E-field), nBi can withstand a current density of about j=1.2A/mm² @ 63°C (just below transition temperature). This doesn't sound much, but when you take in account, topological insulators can be used as capacitors with very high energy density due to their high relative dielectric constant (4.1E6), loss factor and self-discharge rate zero, a capacitor with an area of 10x10cm can withstand juicy 12kA.
@15:12 THANK YOU! I had to do a thorough research paper on that when I was getting my BS in physics. According to BCS theory, high-temperature superconductivity shouldn't be possible: high-temperature superconductors likely operate under a completely different principle than the original superconductors that were predicted, one that we still don't understand.
So, it's entirely possible that room temperature superconductivity can happen... but we honestly have no idea, since we don't understand the fundamental underlying mechanism of the high-temp superconductors in the first place.
I'm a little confused on how cooper pairs are allowed to occupy the same quantum state, when their component electrons aren't? I would think that any given quantum state of a cooper pair would correspond to a particular pair of quantum states for it's component electrons, and those component electrons would still not be allowed to have the same quantum state as electrons in another cooper pair
I don't fully understand it but it's analogous to how a hydrogen atom is electrically neutral despite it's component electron and proton each having a distinct electric charge. Composite bosons show up in a lot of places though including semiconductors.
@@Wolfpack753 Well, sure, but a hydrogen atom is only electrically neutral from afar, those electrons still electrostatically repel other, nearby molecules, which is why macroscopic stuff doesn't pass through each other
It's the same as regular BE condensates with supercooled He, the electrons/protons in the He are all fermions but each He is individually a boson. But taking the wave function of each He individually, you will find that the electrons are antisymmetric with particle exchange (fermionic). QM is kinda all just about a choice of basis for what you want to study; BCS theory is just like "assuming that electrons pair up like this in good approximation (justification for why, etc.), here's the predicted results". You could of course choose a different basis treating each electron individually and solve for the entire solid (in which the electrons would of course be fermionic), but it's too expensive to model things that way so you choose a better starting point.
@@tezzeret2000but in that basis, what would the individual electrons be seen to be doing that gives you the equivalence to superconductivity
The trick is that while Cooper pairs are a combination of quantum states, this combination is more limited than the whole array of states the electrons can have individually. Specifically this limits how the linked pair can exchange energy with their environment.
Consider a plasma; the particles there are free and charged and can thus absorb and emit any energy of electromagnetic radiation. Plasma is opaque to all frequencies of EM. But when the particles cool and form atoms they become more ordered and linked. An electron's state becomes linked to all those in its atom and limited to a specific set of energy levels. At that point the frequencies of photons it can interact with it reduced from infinite to just a few specific ones. The matter goes from opaque to mostly transparent to EM.
Each electron in each atom IS just a combination of quantum states, ones that could occur in the plasma at any time. But the links between various particles' states mean that any one particle CANNOT arbitrarily change state. Cannot arbitrarily change energy.
In a superconductor Cooper pairs are very limited in how they can exchange energy, since BOTH electrons must be involved and BOTH states must change together. They behave as they do not because they are bosons, OR because they're in a low energy state. The single most important factor is that they're limited. That they can't change energy as easily or in as many ways as individual, unlinked electrons.
I got to pay with one of those “race tracks” at KTH in Stockholm. As I remember it it was an Ytterbium-based Type II superconductor doused in liquid nitrogen and wrapped in scotch tape for extra insulation.
The magnet track was probably commercial-grade Neodymium magnets.
Wonder if you could create Muon cooper pairs? They would produce a more massive quasi-particle boson which would probably require a much higher energy 'jiggle' to kick it up out of the low energy state.
Possibly, but muons only live for a very short time before decaying
@@alectoireneperez8444 The last i heard, the half time decay rate of a cow getting their moo on is 1.618033988749 seconds.
In theory all fermions can form cooper pairs at low temperatures. Muons are probably just too short-lived to get them to form pairs.
neat idea, but also I'd just want to chip in that the time it takes to cool down a substance is quite long (compared to the muon lifetime)
Try "Plasmarons in high-temperature cuprate superconductors" for the time being?
For what it is worth: the brilliant app has literally become the bridge between what you mean and what I understand- thank you
Had a laugh. Just the other day i found a new brand of frozen pizza in my regular store. It was actually good. 😂
Love the animations in this video
So to the opening question: "We don't know yet" and 15:32 ... "There are different stories for how the Cooper-pairs form and a single mechanism hasn't been settled on yet. That means it's very difficult to know the maximum temperature for which superconductivity is possible". So the video could have been 10 seconds long 😉
Thanks for covering this! LK-99 craze had me baffled for couple of reasons.
One only needed to do moderate digging to find out that their claim was bogus. Naturally, I don't mean mass media, but many researchers like Sabine Hossenfelder and channels like Sixty Symbols covered it in sufficient detail to give you a more complete picture. That was a nice reminder for me to always go for multiple sources.
Bottom line is that the original paper uploaded to arxiv was ridden with mistakes in methodology. If one read it, or even just quickly looked over, one would have realized how many red flags there were. Infamous chart scaling to start off with. Monstrous claims of impact of their discovery. Lack of reputable measurements. Weird story behind their Quantum Research Center etc. Finally, zero successful replications!
Let's also not forget that LHC only uses high temperature superconductors in current leads as they are ceramics immensely difficult to shape into wires useful in industrial applications. So yeah, it would nice to have those, but changing the world is, uhm, a bit much you could say :D
Scientists working on this kind of research, please keep up the good work, even though this wasn't a success . It opened up a lot of eyes to what this kind of a breakthrough would mean for the whole of mankind.
I love how you make the videos and explain stuff 👌🏼
Great video. Also, i just love the animations you guys make. They are so cool!
A chapter about the (im)possibility of synthesizing a stable nucleus of flerovium (element 114), please.
If it's unstable, we just need to keep adding neutrons, maybe only 200 or 300 or so. It'll be fine, I'm sure...
Sounds like you've got a stuffy nose. I hope you feel better asap. Thank you for the amazing content!
It's because of a lot of compression on the audio
What happens to the levitation in space? For example if gravity isnt pulling the superconductor towards or away from the magnet... or is the flux so much stronger than gravity, such that gravity is completely irrelevant?
I'd think the floating object would fly across the room.
Magnetic levitation is actually coupling or locking. The levitating object can be manipulated and "sticks" in whatever orientation it's in when you stop pushing on it. In freefall it would do the same. Holding it in place at whatever distance and orientation you left it in.
Super conductive/productive notifications! Hi Spacetime!
Guys check your audio pipeline, there was a joke in the other video that the host sounds ai-generated, but it's actually true. Sounds modulated, poorly resampled.
I saw another comment pointing out that he sounds a bit like he has a cold
There's pretty much zero reverb in the audio, which sounds very off. It pretty much bothered me too much to watch the entire video lol.
Check the video before this one and the difference is obvious.
I agree ☝🏻
The audio is too compressed in the recent videos. So weird to listen to.
finally a reliable source to listen to
Seriously though, why does your voice sound robotic sometimes? Is the editor messing with us?
Just in the right time topic. Good job!
The problem lies not solely on the media. The (now debunked) pre-print (which is how science should work) also included a statement that said "we are confident this discovery will change the world". I am sure this was a well-spirited statement, but it delves in the realm of pretentiousness and, in the worst case scenario, the realm of unnecessary precipitous remarks.
It's not uncommon for researchers to put out exaggerated sensational claims for generating attention and attracting investors. I understand why it can happen but it's probably counterproductive to the scientific enterprise as a whole.
Or perhaps they got a little too excited with their preliminary findings and jumped the gun. Who knows?
BRILLIANT...I can vaguely understand this video...😉😉
Room temperature superconductors are like fusion energy, it's always 20 years away.
It's 20 years away forever
The scientists behind "Cold fusion" has something real. They were just slandered in the media because scientists were not *usually* able to reproduce the effect. Not "usually", but there was something real there.
I've never hear of RTSC being any number of years away, just something that will probably happen soonish. Very much like graphene/carbon nanotubes, though I have heard of graphene being 10-15 years away. Grapheme and carbon nanotubes ate confirmed to exist though, so that's more of a question of large-scale production.
No, we've actually had some progress. After 80 years, fusion energy is finally down to 19 years away.
Well at least now it is 20 years away. Not so long ago it was 30 years away. It's progresses
i just love this channel so much
Before I even watch the video, my prediction is: No, but they need to be under obscene amounts of pressure to work at room temperature or something similar which makes them just as impractical or more than conventional liquid helium cooled super conductors
I don't think so. There should be configurations of molecules, that are bound in a way that creates the correct properties.
It's like saying 2 Northpoles of magnets can never stick together. Well that is untrue, because I can superglue them together.
I just redefined the problem and made a different approach.
The same with super conductivity.
In principle yes it shouldn't work in anything than very low temps. But that doesn't mean I can't drill holes into the thing and make pipelines for the electrons to flow effortlessly.
I'm just using metaphors, but I'm confident there should be viable solutions to the room temp superconductor.
@@livinlicious I think no small part of the issue is faster quantum decoherence at high temperatures because all superconductivity relies on cooper pairs of electrons that are entangled such that the pair acts like a boson and can form a superfluid.
the first superconductors that only work right near absolute zero, which we really understand, work because the electrons are bound into pairs by the harmonic oscillation of the atomic nuclei. Cuprate superconductors like YBCO work at higher temperatures because they have a stronger pairing mechanism that isn't definitively understood yet. High pressure helps because it suppresses thermal motion. I think room temperature and pressure superconductivity might require some new physics.
haven't watched the video yet, so I'll see what Matt says.
I gave an informative speech about superconductors and the "recently" discovered ceramic superconductors in my high school speech class--in 1987. I've been interested in superconductivity ever since.
What makes me sad a bit is that how this story LK-99 unfolded can make researchers hesitate to publish their discoveries. It's natural to be wrong sometimes and media just made them monsters.
These researchers, by everything I've heard, had lots of ethical problems before this paper was ever published. Proper researchers should fear the peer review process more than publishing their work. This is why peer review exists, to catch papers like these.
@@Phriedah ok, then, that changes the perspective a bit. Trust me, I've seen some terrible papers, especially in analysis part, so I'm not against peer review. The heck, some of them made their way to media and didn't receive half of the backlash those researches did, but I think I prefer it this way than not knowing about those observations at all because there was no paper in the first place.
That's what the media did with "cold fusion" and Pons and the other guy. But they really did find some results that indicated fusion.
It does highlight how peer works and the problems of hyping up something before it is reviewed. The sad part is by the time the peer review process is done the media has moved on to the next story and never retracts the articles or publishes as retraction. This can leave a plethora of news articles that are factually incorrect that people can still think are true. Much like the vaccine link to autism paper, that was retracted and thoroughly discredited, but still has news articles that reference it as a valid proven study. That’s why we need more science education and content so that we have a better understanding of the science around us.
@@PhriedahAre you sure you're thinking of the right one? Ranga P. Dias has been in the public eye for what is starting to look like fraudulent claims about a superconductor and has a history of them, but he isn't part of the team that made LK99. Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon (The L and K of LK99) don't have that much history.
One of the many topics my Dad and I talked about before his passing, maybe in my life time! 😅
It's not delivery, it's cold fusion?
Great video and very well explained! Thanks for sharing, educating and entertaining!
All I can say is that I'm looking forward to the next superconductor ferver. 😊
Get well soon Matt!
Just change your roomtemperature to -196°C and voila you have a room temperature superconductor!
Has been done for fun. They set up a model of a living room in a freezer and claimed super conductivity at living room temperature.
Here it is: arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2003/2003.14321.pdf
This is the best idea so far.
Build some server farms on Titan.
this channel seems to be getting better with each video.
It most likely is not impossible, but it will require advances in materials manufacturing able to get the crystal structure exactly right in order to get the conduction correct
Or maybe we shouldn't be looking for crystals and instead try to maximize defect density.
@@Laff700or different people research different things
yeah seems like the fusion tokamak/stellerator thing!
i bet we could make some "material" that has these electron funneling vortices baked into them, instead of created/brute-forced by "flow" and cold temperatures!
@@Laff700 indeed, we'd probably need to find an Ideal Glass to make a room temp superconductor (or at least find out what the maximum temp for superconductivity is). It's no surprise to me that all these higher-temp superconductors are ceramics.
Metastable metallic hydrogen (if it exists) has been proposed as a likely room temperature semiconductor. It's very interesting to read about for more reasons than only that
The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
Can someone enlighten me as to the actual use of a non-malleable, metal-ceramic super-conductor? It seems to me that we have lN2-temperature, ceramic super-conductors which have almost no utility already. Where does increasing the critical pressure and critical temperature, without the necessary physical properties of the material actually get us?
What use room temperature super conductors would have??
@@KastorFluxThat's not how semiconductors work
@@ResandOuiesextremely wide range of uses, anything involving electricity. From fusion reactors to magnetic levitation trains
They're already used in MRI and NMR machines, along with particle accelerators. Mostly used today to generate extremely powerful magnetic fields.
Flexibility is not an issue, a glass bottle doesn't bend and breaks easily but a fiberglass cloth can be easily folded, yet both are made from glass.
Currently it's a bit risky investing in developing any one superconductor. Since there are constant improvements, if you spent a decade working on something, all your work might be undone by developments in that time. As such the current lack of utility isn't the best measure.
As such the issue is a measure of cost. Room temperature would require little or no cooling, which would be a significant savings. That could be enough to tip the balance for certain applications. (For example transmission lines are wires, but buried rods of material could also be made to work, IF its cheap enough.)
Without a cheap, easily fabricated metallic HTSC that can take a decent current applications will always be more limited. I mean we don't use silver and gold wires for everything despite their superior lack of resistance. But there's a lot of potential, even now for utilizing superconductors. The question is how close to a dream material we can get. If it's good enough we'll change how we use conductors to take advantage of it.
It's amazing that we somehow ate at the same point as decades ago, not fully understanding what's happening with superconductors (high temperature) perhaps when we find out new theory we can pursuit the final go of a room temperature superconducter
Could you have closer to room temperature superconductivity with super heavy elements that we haven't yet been able to synthesize and find a "stable" state for? My postulation is that having the electrons so far out due to the need for a bigger electron shell radius would reduce the resistance between electrons since they aren't held to the atom as stringently. Right?
The big issue isn't binding to atoms, elements like rubidium hold their electrons incredibly weakly, while those like seaborgium should hold them very tightly, forming incredibly tough metals.
The trick instead is having electrons that are limited, ones that have no choice but to form, and stay in, Cooper-like pairs.This is why so many ceramics make the list.Electrons need to be free to move, but not so free they can bump into everything.
@@garethdean6382 can you elaborate any further? I'm really interested in the nuance of all this.
Having weakly bound electrons is very good for having *regular* conductors.All metals are elements that have weakly bound electrons, and the heavier an element is, the more metallic it tends to be. Metals can be a billion times more conductive than light elements like sulfur. I can confidently say most superheavy elements would beat the conductivity of phosphorous a million times over. Metals are nearly perfect conductors.
But not perfect. Electrons moving through them face a situation like trying to walk through a crowd at a concert. People keep bumping into one another, knocking each other around. Electrons in metals, even the 'best' metals, keep hitting atoms and other electrons, getting shaken around and turning their energy into heat.
At low temperatures the atoms don't move. Like a crowd of people standing in place, it's easier to walk through them. In superconductors electrons can 'run through' the gaps between atoms and not hit anything.
High temperate superconductors seem to work by 'locking' the atoms in place (Which is why so many are ceramics.) If the atoms can't move about randomly,t hey can't disrupt the electrons as they move.
And that's the important part, not just having electrons that can move, but electrons that won't be messed with AS they move.
@@garethdean6382 So what you're saying is that beyond even a few degrees Kelvin there's just too much chaos to make it possible? What if the element was so heavy that it's basically the theoretical limit for an element since any heavier and you would have to rely on pressures from something like an extremely dense star core? Would the elements be far enough apart then because there are so few of them due to the sheer amount of positive charge, or would there still be just too many atoms causing chaos for the system to work like a superconductor?
8:34 The phase transition point depends on Tc, Ic, Bc, and Pc. The reason for Ic is obvious.
If it's hard to get room temperature super conductors maybe we should try the other way around and adjust the room temperature. Just set it to high, and use high temperature superconductors that we have working today.
I like how even if room temperature superconductors that are cheap were a thing we would still need to use regular conductors for heating things up like in resistive electrical heaters and in toasters, toastie makers, and those portable electrical toasting ovens.
Has someone got a cold ?
Has someone not paid to sound editor?
Thanks for this.
He's either got a cold or been replaced by AI, either way, it's upsetting me 😂
Thank you for continuing making great content
All we need to do is to convince metallic hydrogen to keep existing at room temperatures and pressures :)
I enjoy your articles on Hackaday!
Dungeon Master: "ok. Make a Diplomacy check with a -20 penalty. DC is 45."
@@sellicott Thank you for reading them! :)
You forgot "Matt has entered into a superconductor state at room temperature. Comments will return when his electrons stabilize"
I think you're being awfully generous to the research team by blaming it all on the media. Not only was there a lack of due diligence before publishing, what was published was very suspicious. In particular, the very poor resolution on the critical graph that was supposed to show zero resistance.
Thunderfoot did a great video on this. He points out that high temperature superconductors do exist and have for decades. They are still cooled well below freezing but much warmer than super conductors commonly used in industry.
There are other problems with these high temperature superconductors. Namely they are usually ceramics that cannot be easily made into coils and they have a relatively small current limit before they loose superconductivity.
One major breakthrough would be lossless energy transport over long distances - you could turn the Sahara into a giant solar generator and feed the world.
Until the locals capture the solar fields and hold them for ransom
Nice.
All this could mean that civilizations that exist on lower-temperature planets could be far more advanced than ours because they've come into contact with superconductivity far earlier and more easily.
Mind, low temperatures slow reactions, they might still belittle more than microbial mats.
Lev Landau's hairdo is EPIC!
There was a time when zero resistance was thought impossible then someone created the first super conductor
Amazing animations! Now I understand all the comments on the LK-99 market on Manifold xD
Since the first time I heard about the superconductive material and then saw how only half of it was floating, I instantly knew there had to be some impurities in the sample and that’s exactly what happened. Technically another hoax.
Hoax implies intentional deception though.
Asking "is this what we think it is?" after making what looks like an amazing discovery is how science works. The answer being "no" doesn't make it a hoax.
@@Merennulli
Hoax in terms of the claims that they made being actually a super conductor at room temperature.
@@Bassotronics"Hoax" is always intentional. Just being wrong doesn't make it a hoax and they were invested in it with a patent application and a scramble for credit. It's pretty clear looking over everything that the people involved believed it was one.
Making progress in superconductivity is like a cheat code that unlocks a Nobel Prize.
Pretty sure that no matter how much humans evolve we will always be capable of creating complete embarrassment at any temperature.
TikTok is one such example of a room-temperature stupidity superconductor.
Can you explain how cooper pairs (or, bosonic quasiparticles in general) can occupy the same states without breaking physics for the fermions that are still in the system? If two cooper pairs have the same energy, what about the individual electrons?
+ I have the same question, replying for engagement purposes
@@KastorFlux You still have two spinors in the system, particle or wave
@@KastorFlux What whataboutism???
@@KastorFlux It's not odd at all, because fundamentally the electrons are described by spin 1/2 spinors... What I want to see is a derivation of why coupling two spinors into a bosonic state results in degenerate energy states.
You're the one strawmanning here.
Cooper pairs will act bosonic, but only to a point. You cannot, for example, stack' an indefinite number of them in the same volume as you can with photons because their constituent particles will interact. In a sense there's a scale below which the bosonic behavior will disappear. We can see this with, say, atoms, which display different properties on the atomic scale compared to what a particle probing the nuclear scale would see.
So the electrons in identical Cooper pairs will have the same energy level -and as such will not be able to occupy the same space, making the behavior of such pairs different from a 'true' boson but also different from isolated electrons.
Superconductivity arises more from how limited the interaction of Cooper pairs is, rather than anything involving bosons. They don't even need to be in the same energy state;it's the lack of mechanisms to make them *change* states that allows their motion to be unimpeded. Forming pairs is just the only mechanism that will limit them severely enough.
Great video! Thanks a lot!