Re:The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
by Mizza on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:56PM
(#36866548)
Sounds like you've got a very interesting weekend project coming up!
Re:The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
by Maxion on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:10PM
(#36866804)
The synthesis section honestly looks very simple, I would assume a simple ceramic kiln could be used?
You just need PbO, PbSO4, Cu, and P powders.
Re:The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
by foxhill on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @03:16PM
(#36867872)
kiln materials are listed, too
not that i think it matters that much. the paper doesn’t indicate that synthesis is a particularly sensitive step.
Re:The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
by aden1ne on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @04:57PM
(#36869412)
The powdered lead seems like something you need to be careful with tho. Quite toxic.
Re:The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
by civilitty on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @07:54PM
(#36871339)
No more or less toxic than the powders used to hand mix oil paints. Just buy a fume hood off ebay.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if even simpler methods are feasible.
For instance, there's a rapid synthesis method for YBCO that uses a small alumina boat, some glass wool, a residential 800w microwave oven, and slightly modified mixture of precursors to allow free oxygen to be liberated in the mixture during heating and trapped in the wool around the sample so you don't need to rig an oxygen concentrator up. IIRC it only takes about 15 minutes to prepare a sample.
This is extremely exciting! I've read hundreds of papers on superconductor manufacture and testing over the years and this has all the hallmarks of legitimacy, at least from my citizen-mad-scientist perspective.