Superconductor means low resistance. Low resistance means less loss due to heat on a wire. Room temperature superconductor also means more efficient magnets for motors, coils, ending up in cars, MRI machines, etc.
It'll be hard to make traditional motor windings out of this particular material because AFAIK it's a ceramic, but perhaps with thin films on flex PCBs it would be possible.
I'm imagining a future where a superconducting layer on a PCB is just another checkbox you can choose when ordering small runs of boards.
[ ] 1 oz copper
[ ] 2 oz copper (+$2)
[X] 10 micron LK-99 (+$10)
Another thought - I think the first place we'll see this widely rolled out is in IC's (waiting for the Asianometry video on it). IC's are already planar, they're small so exotic materials aren't a big contributor to costs, and they're very power dense. Replacing a metal layer with a superconducting one could enable greater gate density and potentially significant improvements in efficiency. I don't know by how much because switching losses are probably where most energy is dissipated, but it's an incremental change that seems compatible with the process.
The theoretical papers I've seen (linked here in recent days) suggest that pure crystals of LK-99 would superconduct only in one dimension so it's likely to be fussier than that.
Perhaps it will be like a "tape" laid down with the proper orientation for each conductor. Perhaps you'll need separate north-south and east-west and maybe diagonal layers with special attention to inter-layer connections.
Well, you still lose current over time... for example, we had to dump a bucket of electrons into our superconducting, supercooled magnet about every month ago to keep things swirling properly.
> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.
If you can extract work from the field generated by the supercurrent, it must come from somewhere. Small supercurrents make small fields, so things like adiabatic CPUs seem interesting.
Can you extract work from a constant magnetic field? As I remember my physics education, constant magnetic fields don't do any work, since they apply a force perpendicular to the direction of motion.
I'm not a physicist, but I play with circuitry... two nearby loops of wire are magnetically coupled. If one is a superconductor with some stored current, and the other is a normal conductor with some resistance, then it stands to reason that the supercurrent will burn heat off in the resistive loop.
What happens in the scenario where the superconductor coil is just replaced with a permanent magnet? I'm pretty sure the energy that the loop dissipates comes from the energy required to move the loop into position, which the inductor experiences as a changing magnetic field.
And the issue being that it takes a lot of energy to super cool those superconductors, and thus they can only be used in highly specialized applications. A room temperature superconductor would be like any other conductor, just much, much better.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
I want the hardware to protect me perhaps with a key or handle or something. Talking to the hardware: Give me a block of memory that I can append to the end of. Another piece of code: Allow me to access that other block for read only.
Each piece of software has some sort of identification. Then the hardware throws an interrupt if a piece of software uses some memory incorrectly.
That's neat, although the left channel of my wireless earbuds drop out like 2% of the time!
What I want is a shoulder implanted pacemaker that's significantly smaller, with a quarter of the primary battery capacity, and an inductively charged supercap that can store enough charge to run at least week between charges.
I imagine you may know a lot about this, but what OS/machine were they using to develop it? PDP-11?, CPM? What editors did they use? Line editors? Which machines did they use to test on? Most drives and even RAM was unreliable back then and everything was small. I imagine there were plenty of obstacles back then. I remember using CPM where floppy disks had to be swapped between the editor and compiler, and your program may fit on another floppy disk.
There are clues they may have used Unix at some point, but the books I've read were vague about that. As the blog post points out, apparently they used MASM that ran on DOS, meaning they were using the IBM PC as the development machine.
The magnet is usually used as a mitigator to turn off the device in case the device is doing something wrong like producing pulses too fast. There is typically RF communication that can communicate to the device and can often be used to turn the magnet detection off, which means that the device will not quit working when a magnet is detected. This was used in the past for electric trains or other large magnets such as in factories.
The magnet is usually used as a mitigator to turn off the device in case the device is doing something wrong like producing pulses too fast. There is typically RF communication that can communicate to the device and can often be used to turn the magnet detection off, which means that the device will not quit working when a magnet is detected.
