The news in science as of late has been awash with the claims surrounding a material known
as LK99, and whether it can function as a room temperature superconductor.
This can go one of two ways, either this material will fail to live up to the hype, or it will
live up to it.
If it does not, it will enter the annals of science history as a hyped or failed idea
based on bad science, something the superconductor question already has a history of in the form
of previous claims only to be later shown to be false.
If it pans out and works however, then quite simply the world just changed in a somewhat
major way and new technologies will come on the table that will help define the future
of human civilization from here on out, more on that in a bit.
So what is a superconductor?
This is all about electrical resistance and magnetism.
For resistance, it’s how much a material opposes the flow of electricity through it.
A piece of rubber for example, is extremely resistive, which is why it’s used as an
insulator.
It blocks current, and keeps you from getting a shock.
But the wire inside it, say made of copper, is highly conductive so you can have electricity
flow through it, but not flawlessly at room temperature.
This arrangement is how the electrical wiring in our houses and apartments work.
Wires are room temperature electrical conductors, but they are wasteful.
A lot of energy is lost.
So as current moves through wire encountering resistance from atoms and such moving around,
it’s lost in the form of heat.
This is why your devices, your television, computer monitors etc. are always warm to
the touch and often require things like CPU cooling fans, heat sinks, and the like.
But, long ago actually, It was noticed however that the lower the temperature of the ordinary
metal conductor, the more its resistance drops.
It was found however that in certain other materials, things can get very strange as
opposed to regular metal wires.
Some materials, the superconductors, have a critical temperature that if you drop the
material below it, its resistance abruptly collapses to zero meaning that electrical
current can pass through it unimpeded.
This has some profound implications if certain things happen.
This is literally quantum mechanics at work, and not only do you get zero resistance, you
also see all magnetic field lines from the interior of the superconducting material get
expelled during its transition into the superconducting state.
This is called the Meissner effect, and its most marked effect is levitation.
This happens because when a magnet is placed above a material becoming superconductive
at low temperature, any magnetic fields that were passing through the superconductor are
expelled, forcing the magnet to levitate as though it were repelling from another magnet.
The problem is, you can get the same effect from diamagnetism, regular magnets repelling
materials, and the effect can be very similar, which can make something seem superconductive
in one behavior, when it isn’t in another, which is one of the criticisms of experiments
with LK 99 in the past.
A copper plate coated in the material may react to a magnet, but so will the copper
plate itself, making it difficult to prove what’s actually going on.
Regular diamagnetism, or diamagnetism from superconductivity.
It blurs.
Here it pays to look at magnetism itself.
This is a simple refrigerator magnet.
One of my refrigerator magnets, in fact.
And, being me, it happens to be attached to a depiction of the main mirror of the James
Webb Space Telescope.
But it also represents something else.
A strong case can be made that the humble magnet is among the most important inventions
in all of human history.
But it ultimately stems from nature, as all inventions do.
Magnetism has been known for much if not all of human history.
Lodestone is an iron ore that is naturally magnetic.
In the Greco-Roman world, it was known as stone from the region of Magnesia, which is
now Manisa in modern day Turkey where it’s still found.
Use of magnetism is also quite ancient, there are accounts of it being used in India, Anatolia
and China as long ago as 2500 years, if not far earlier.
By the 11th century in China, it was already known that you could make artificial magnets
by quenching hot iron surrounded by the earth’s magnetic field.
A century later, magnetic compasses were proliferating across Asia and Europe.
By 1743, more efficient magnets came into use in the form of Daniel Bernouli’s horseshoe
magnet, which slows down demagnetization by manipulating the magnetic field lines to the
opposite pole.
Later, it was found that electrical current deflects compasses.
Andre-Marie Ampere found that iron could be magnetized in an electric solenoid, which
led to the electromagnet becoming a commercial product in the 19th century, and that led
to electric motors and more importantly, electrical power generation using magnets in turbines
which we use to this day and it provides much of our energy.
Magnets however have an interesting property that anyone that’s ever played with them
knows.
Not only can they attract, they can also repel to the point of allowing for the levitation
of another magnet so well that it defeats the earth’s gravity.
So as unbelievably useful as electromagnetism has proven to be, it was also know that the
envelope could be pushed further in the form of the superconductors, specifically LK 99.
These materials would be really useful in everyday technological life, but there is
a catch.
In order to make the known superconductors actually go superconductive, you needed extremely
low temperatures, which is expensive and not easily incorporated into our technology.
In other words, really interesting, but also really impractical.
Even though we’ve known about superconductive properties for about a century, it wasn’t
until relatively recently that the mystery deepened.
It was long thought that superconductors needed temperatures near absolute zero to work and
there never would be any kind of warmer temperature superconductor.
In 1986 however, a ceramic material was found to have a critical temperature well above
that, still -183 celsius, but even that warm that should not have been possible according
to the models at the time, setting off a discussion of how useful warm temperature superconductors
could be, and the hunt for them began.
These materials became known as high temperature superconductors, and the temperatures involved
allow liquid nitrogen, which is cheap but unwieldy, to get you to superconductivity
in certain materials.
This gets closer to room temperature superconductors, though that’s a wide definition as room
temperature can still be defined as very cold in this context.
One that actually literally is in the range of the temperature of an average room was
still almost unthinkable.
And that’s where LK 99 comes in.
LK-99 is a polycrystalline material, basically a mixture of lead, oxygen and phosphorus that’s
been infused, or doped with copper.
The claim is that this material is superconductive at ambient temperature, and has zero resistance
in most settings.
If true, that would change the world.
But how do you tell the effect from regular diamagnetic effects?
Time, and actually demonstrating superconductivity.
After the release of the paper in English, a frenzy was set off in all quarters to synthesize
the material, which is actually rather simple, and see if it really was a superconductor.
And there has been nothing but contradictory early results, with both apparently confirmations,
but also non-confirmations, one team in India made a particularly good case that it was
unable to confirm it.
There has been some talk about how materials like LK-99 could work as a superconductor,
if you put the copper atoms in the right place, but that’s more involved than how Lk-99
as it is right is made, it’s far coarser, and the paper also shows that if you don’t
get the copper atoms just so, you won’t see the effect.
There’s also the issue that the research involved seemed to have been released prematurely
by one member of the team, apparently against the wishes of the rest of the members.
This is not yet peer reviewed published material, and there are inconsistencies in the data.
That’s not a good environment for a major scientific discovery to say the least, and
there has been much skepticism from within the scientific community against this material.
In other words, it needs a lot more proof.
That will either come, or it will not, but my own skepticism tells me it’s probably
not as it seems and with more work, it may be shown to not be the case.
On the other hand though, it does seem to be leading to a new avenue of thinking about
room temperature superconductors, so that might serve as a seed into further development
of materials like LK-99, or something close to it, that could eventually get us at least
somewhat warmer superconductors.
But, I can be wrong, and my mind can change so here’s where we would go if LK-99 really
is an ambient temperature superconductor.
First and foremost, superconductors should get cheaper unless the material ends up wildly
expensive to produce, or impossible to do so industrially.
This is already an issue.
We already use superconductors in various low temperature or high pressure environments
already, specifically in MRI machines, quantum computers or as close to those as we think
we’re getting, nuclear fusion experiments and so on.
Very specialized, expensive uses.
And while we know of hundreds, if not more, superconductive materials.
We only use four because the manufacturing only lines for them, and the others aren’t
practical.
With ambient temperature, the next potential would be far more efficient power grids, at
least in some applications within.
Here we may not get to zero resistance, not because of lack of superconductivity, but
other properties the superconductive material has, whatever it ends up being.
Will it be better for wiring than copper?
Unknown, but it could simply be too delicate other than for very specialized stages in
the power grid, or too expensive and so on.
After all, we’re talking about a material that hasn’t proven to exist yet as far as
superconductivity.
Another problem with electrical generation here is that alternative energy sources come
with downfalls, such as energy use increasing when it’s dark outside, you turn on the
lights, but that’s an issue for solar power generation which needs the sun.
Wind suffers a similar problem, necessitating the fossil fuels to keep it all going because
they can be burned on demand.
But what happens if you could STORE the energy produced by solar and wind for when you really
need it.
This is where room temperature superconductors might find a use, and it’s very different
types of batteries than we use right now that can store energy indefinitely at 100 percent
efficiency and no running cost.
Add it superconducting wiring to transport the energy at a lossless rate, and you’ve
just taken a huge leap in solving the world’s energy crisis.
Another area is better, more efficient computation.
You can make better chips in standard computers, but also really improve the possibilities
for quantum computers.
This is because superconductors and and do function as cubits, the problem being with
standard superconductors you have to keep everything cryogenically cold.
Room temperature dramatically alters that state of affairs immediately.
Also, MRI’s get cheaper, and eliminate the need for liquid helium, something we will
eventually run out of, and all sorts of new imaging techniques could be developed for
security and medicine.
Even radio astronomy would get cheaper and easier.
Another potential would be levitating maglev trains that run very cheaply in comparison
to anything we have today.
Again, if the economics of it can be made to work as far as manufacturing the components
needed.
Even back to the future style hoverboards are on the table, without the need for filling
them low temperature liquids, though it’s a novelty that you might see specialized rinks
that can cover their floor in magnets, but street use is centuries away.
There however the principle might allow for hovering cars, a trope in futurism that’s
never quite come close to fruition other than the flying buses we call commercial aircraft
along with private planes.
They are not cars however, and only through superconductors might such a thing ever have
a chance at reality.
Fusion energy would take a step closer, but there are other concerns there that are holding
it back.
So in the end, LK-99 still needs to be proven as a superconductor, and it either will be,
or it will not be, and we’ll know within a few weeks.
I think it’s best to temper this one with skepticism, but also be open to something
new that will start us on a technological path that so many have hoped we might someday
go down.
We shall see how it unfolds.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently eyeing the hoverboards
suspiciously.
I long ago had to give up skateboarding because if I do it now everything hurts for a week,
but teens and 20’s me did and I really think a lot of fun and crazy stuff you can do directly
involves the physics of the wheels and the ground as much as it does motion.
I’m not sure you could do a lot of really crazy stuff with a superconducting hoverboard,
or at least it would be very different.
So skaters, past and present let me know what you think in the comments below and be sure
to check out my books, which hope to someday be superconductive and become the first books
or ebooks think the superconducting kindle that -=you don’t have to hold in bed to
read, at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular,
in depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we live.