Comment on [deleted]
Moose@moose.best 1 year ago
I think it might still be too early to say for certain. It appears that a lot of the teams working on replication have pretty different outcomes and I think the theoretical studies have shown superconduction may be possible when a very specific structure forms, so maybe the formula just isn’t perfected yet or it needs very specific conditions to form correctly. We’ll know soon enough though, it’s at the very least still an interesting material that deserves more looking into.
neuromancer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
astropenguin5@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The only proof of superconductivity is from simulations done by Berkely National Labs, but only when the copper atom is in a higher energy than normal position in the crystal lattice, making changes of it doing so in the current production technique small. For this reason I’m still holding out hope that it’s just the synthesis process that needs refining, or if it really isn’t a room temp superconductor, will at least lead to a proper room temp superconductor in the near future
galilette@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Mind you, the DFT calculation from the Griffin paper is not a proof of LK 99 being a superconductor in any way. What it showed is the (potential) formation of flat bands near the Fermi surface. Band dispersion is associated with the kinetic energy of the electrons, so materials with flat band at the Fermi surface is more susceptible to interaction effect (and strong interaction causes all sorts of nonintuitive quantum effects). I’m not a DFT expert in any sense, but from what I’ve heard, it is quite easy to “tune” your model to produce narrow (the limit of which being flat) bands from substitutions (e.g. the Cu substitution in this case) and such, which don’t necessarily lead to superconductivity.
So I’ll take the DFT papers (there are quite a few now) as saying, “hey you want some flat band? Here’s some. We’ve done our part. Now some other theorist, do your magic and conjure up some superconductivity”. It’s a cog in the full picture, if there is a full picture
Moose@moose.best 1 year ago
Not at room temperature. According to the Wikipedia page, one team in China has a preliminary report stating they got superconductivity (or at least 10^-5Ω) at 110°K, so maybe that temperature can be increased somehow?