"Accomplished by a team at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and posted 30 minutes ago.

Why this is evidence: The LK-99 flake slightly levitates for both orientations of the magnetic field, meaning it is not simply a magnetized piece of iron or similar ‘magnetic material’. A simple magnetic flake would be attracted to one polarity of the strong magnet, and repelled by the other. A diamagnet would be repelled under either orientation, since it resists and expels all fields regardless of the polarity.

Caveats There is no way to verify the orientation of the strong magnet in this video, also, there are yet to be published experimental measured values of this sample. Diamagnetism is a property of superconductors but without measured and verified data, this is just suggestive of a result.

Take-away If this synthesis was indeed successful, then this material is easy enough to be made by labs other than the original research team. I would watch carefully for results out of Argonne National Lab, who are reported to be working on their own synthesis of a sample.

This overall corroborates two independent simulation studies that investigated the original Korean authors claim about material and crystal structure, and both studies supported the claims.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16892.pdf Shenyang National Lab: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16040.pdf "

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    This is where my mind went. Wondered if the reduction in heat would allow further overclocking/defaults on both CPU and GPUs. I don’t know that much about the actual hardware and how it works though.

    • @KhanzarateEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Not really. First, standard equipment is limited by cost, not technology. Nothing stopping some power user from using liquid nitrogen to cool a desktop, it’s just costly. Superconductor tech, though, would be bleeding edge, it wouldn’t cost any less for a long time. Supercomputing, on the other hand, has had access to more esoteric cooling systems, and can already use them. They also have had access to the extreme cold superconductors that have already existed.

      The real issue there is the CPU makes the heat, but this tech isn’t a transistor. We can’t replace the silicon chips with superconducting ones, at least not in a form dense enough to be a CPU. There’s lots of small improvements around the CPU we can make, but those aren’t at the “wow, this will revolutionize technology” level. They’re cool but it’s the other stuff that’s gonna get the focus.

    • @woefkardoesEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Managing heat is a large part of circuit design. Superconductors can fundamentally change everything about it meaning far smaller much faster and more capable in every way. As an example 95%+ of modern CPU’s and GPUs are cooling related. The actual chips are tiny in comparison to the whole component.