For what it's worth, superconductors have a shared budget[1] of (magnetic field, temperature, current). At 25°C, the material is near its critical temperature, so its current-carrying capacity is necessarily diminished. At a lower temperature, the film should be able to carry more current.
That said, 250mA is plenty of current if you're interested in making a superconducting CPU.
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/scbc2.html
Today, Word is much more capable as a scientist's tool.
I've done professional typesetting and cataloging with QuarkXPress and InDesign both and it was extremely fast, that's for professional high quality publishing. .doc and .md is fine for information first publishing.
Latex is not simple and is in my opinion just a big nerd snipe, its the intrusive thought of layout software, for humanities sake we'd be better off with simpler tools like markdown + math notation and if latex had been never invented.
Or would you rather have me google a GUI that lets me "quickly rename" and download a few programs that have this capability? Or do a few hundred files by hand?
Command line is... fine for doing this occasionally, but it's hardly "quick" or usable for this, I'm saying that as an advanced commandline user. You're just using the tool that you already have and know, and it happens to be the system shell. It doesn't have to be.
(another question is that classic file management at the scale where a sophisticated tool is needed is mostly automated nowadays, and yes there's scripting as well)
I would prefer not to have gatekeeping either way, both "It was written using Word, it must be fake" and "Latex should never have been invented."
There are big geek communities that lead newbies astray by recommending it, it's a nerd snipe that wastes a lot of brain cycles better used elsewhere. It's only little b bad, not big B bad.
I am saying it's a poor tool, a waste of time and an evolutionary dead end, people are allowed to fetishize poor tools, efficiency, simplicity and legibility are very poor in latex world with a high learning curve for a task that is at best tertiary to the task of doing real research, it's a tool that promotes rabbit trails, bike shedding and procrastination.
And the small amount of research that has looked into this has apparently born this out in at least some small degree. It's not a hot take if it's got backing.
To your main point, no, theoretical physics paper are almost all written in latex. I can't recall word-written theory paper. Experimental papers are sometimes word, but pretty rarely. You can try randomly sample papers from cond-mat arxiv to verify it.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
A couple of posts about how poor that paper was:
• https://lemire.me/blog/2015/01/14/knauff-and-nejasmic-recomm...
And even at 250mA, there'd be tons of different usecases for a superconductor.
I have only met a few physicists who don't write papers in latex. They are all 65+ and generally work with younger scientists/grad students who prepare the paper in latex for final drafts and submissions.
No less than Donald Knuth in fact
This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously:
- re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution.
- re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with:
> There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…
Sometimes you have to collaborate outside of physics!
He did not know LaTeX. Most of his papers probably were in LaTeX, as his students knew it. But I remember multiple papers he "authored" in Word, because that's what the student preferred.
I was in a top 10 school (in physics and engineering), and I can assert that the fraction of physics faculty who did not know TeX/LaTeX was at least a quarter, and could be as high as 50%.
All the major physics journals would accept Word submissions.
It's not at all unusual.
What's more interesting is flexibility. Current ceramic liquid-nitrogen-cooled superconductors are not flexible at all; they are brittle. This can be fine for a transmission line, but makes things hard for various coils.
Ummm am I the only one who finds this line hilarious?
most humble hackernews commenter
The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the superconductivity. Probably because it is only a thin film, the material could only support about 250 mA at 25°C before losing superconductivity. So even if the paper is correct, it might turn out to be challenging to get to higher currents. Or maybe not and one could just roll up a wide thin film and have as much amps as one likes.
EDIT: I misread the thin film thing, they also produced a thin film but primarily they describe the material testes as follows without any dimensions I could immediatly spot.
After the reaction, a dark gray ingot was obtained reproducibly and then made into the shape of thin cuboids for electrical measurements [...]