#Superconductors

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists have found a key process required for superconductivity occurring at higher temperatures than previously thought. It could be a small but significant step in the search for one of the "holy grails" of physics, a superconductor that operates at room temperature. The discovery, made inside the unlikely material of an electrical insulator, reveals electrons pairing up at temperatures of up to minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius) — one of the secret ingredients to the near-lossless flow of electricity in extremely cold superconducting materials. So far, the physicists are baffled by why this is happening. But understanding it could help them find room-temperature superconductors. The researchers published their findings Aug. 15 in the journal Science.

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[looseartist]

2E T RB lance low res

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Relativistic spin-orbit coupling may lead to unconventional superconductivity type

Observing the effects of special relativity doesn't necessarily require objects moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. In fact, length contraction in special relativity explains how electromagnets work. A magnetic field is just an electric field seen from a different frame of reference. So, when an electron moves in the electric field of another electron, this special relativistic effect results in the moving electron interacting with a magnetic field, and hence with the electron's spin angular momentum. The interaction of spin in a magnet field was, after all, how spin was discovered in the 1920 Stern Gerlach experiment. Eight years later, the pair spin-orbit interaction (or spin-orbit coupling) was made explicit by Gregory Breit in 1928 and then found in Dirac's special relativistic quantum mechanics. This confirmed an equation for energy splitting of atomic energy levels developed by Llewellyn Thomas in 1926, due to 1) the special relativistic magnetic field seen by the electron due to its movement ("orbit") around the positively charged nucleus, and 2) the electron's spin magnetic moment interacting with this magnetic field.

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[frogsat]

Welp I've learned a hard lesson in the dangers of joining hype trains. Replication and peer review came to the conclusion that LK-99's claims of being a superconductor are false. In fact, it seems to be a worse conductor than just copper at room temperature. Summary Article

So it goes. Not the first false superconductor claim, won't be the last.

[onlytiktoks]

https://www.wsj.com/science/physics/microsoft-quantum-computing-physicists-skeptical-d3ec07f0

[wireless-wonders-uk]

Microsoft Unveils Majorana 1: A Quantum Computing Breakthrough

Microsoft has announced a major advancement in quantum computing with the launch of its first quantum computing chip, Majorana 1. This breakthrough follows nearly two decades of research in the field and is a crucial step toward the company's goal of developing large-scale quantum computers. The company claims that in order to create this chip, it had to engineer an entirely new state of matter, which it refers to as a topological state. This new state of matter is key to the stability and efficiency of quantum computing, which has long faced challenges due to the fragile nature of qubits.

Topological Qubits – The chip contains eight topological qubits, which provide higher stability compared to conventional qubits used by competitors like Google and IBM.Exotic Material Composition – The chip is built using indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor), helping to create the necessary environment for quantum behavior.Atom-by-Atom Engineering – Microsoft had to precisely align atoms to achieve the required conditions for a topological state, making this a significant materials science achievement.

[academango]

Some highlights from recent reading

[just-some-troglodyte]

i wonder what it would be like to be super-conductive

like IDK i was a some kind of alien that somehow was just defaultly in that state at all times. science side of tumblr, give me you knowledge!

[theeliasarchives]

Finally listening to all of The Superconducting Supercolliders work..

Designations has me in a chokehold.

(This music is so good, though???)

[fentmeister]

2005 facebook was WILD

[urists]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

holy shit, STP superconductor. Huge if true.

(That being said, it’s arxiv and I don’t quite have the background to fully process the validity of this; if you do, please leave thoughts.)

[looseartist]

WTR 0_0 low res

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Superconductivity researchers solve the mystery of Fermi arcs

High-temperature superconductivity is one of the great mysteries of modern physics: Some materials conduct electrical current without any resistance—but only at very low temperatures. Finding a material that remains superconducting even at room temperature would spark a technological revolution. People all over the world are therefore working on a better, more comprehensive understanding of such materials. An important step has now been taken at TU Wien (Vienna). A particularly interesting class of high-temperature superconductors, known as cuprates, exhibit a very surprising effect. Under certain conditions, the electrons in these materials can only move in certain directions. The permitted directions can be visualized as curves, known as Fermi arcs.

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[your-god-empress-lavender]

LK-99 SUPERCONDUCTOR!!!!!!!!!!!

SO FUCKING HYPED. The LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) simulations show LK-99 (not 100% proof, but damn good evidence) is actually for real a superconductor. This, along with their showing that it only acts as a superconductor with the copper in an energetically unfavorable (high energy) position explains basically all the failures to reproduce and why the people who did have success (like Iris and the chinese labs that showed some weak levitation) did not have results that look as impressive as we'd usually see from more conventional superconductors. Anyway, thank you so much to Iris because she's the most based researcher i know of working on this. Also, i know that it's not a totally settled issue, but the evidence in favor of it is so much stronger than the evidence to the contrary IMO.

Okay, so, i got distracted for like 3 hours after writing this, but still very hyped. Looking forward to new methods of production, so once i move into college i'll probably try to work on a new synthesis of it, but real quick, what do y'all think of me trying to (with no experience, kinda just educated shots in the dark) make another material that uses the same doping technique? That is to say (more descriptively) attempting to make a hexagonal, potentially just apatite again, mineral that has one of its metal ions replaced with something else that forces the hexagons to expand or contract (hopefully making a superconductor (but like, very low odds))