> people are able to make a high performing material at an affordable price, people solve all the practical problems,
What are the implications of that? What are the effects? How does that change my life? How does it change society?
Better particle accelerators, MRI machines, fusion reactors. (If we can greatly strengthen the magnetic field the reactor gets smaller are more economical.)
Better magnetic field sensors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
Possibly better logic gates post-Silicon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum
Better magnetic levitation rail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
When I think of all those things I think the RSFQ logic gates are most likely to be revolutionary.
For anyone else reading this, there's an autocorrect mishaps here: it's supposed to be “cuprate superconductors”.
* You can make charger cables out of it but it will make no practical difference, actually marking things worse due to subpar mechanical aspects.
* In-device interconnects, motherboard-level - maybe. Tiny bump in efficiency.
* CPUs etc - highly unlikely, we are talking dozens-atoms-level stuff, going to be really hard to replicate superconductor properties AND the usual semiconductor stuff
* Networking - this one could be great. No signal repeaters, faster (optical cables are slow due to weird curved path light takes).
Out if ideas. Anything else? Hi-power applications are more straightforward - better electric engines, etc. World-changing power transmission stuff...
P.S. Cold Fusion exists, just not practical atm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
CPUs etc - highly unlikely, we are talking dozens-atoms-level
stuff, going to be really hard to replicate superconductor
properties AND the usual semiconductor stuff
Maybe a RTSC based chip doesnt need to compete with modern chips in terms of process size or complexity
What if you could just make an RTSC based chip with complexity and process size comparable to e.g. a 1993 era 80386 but it runs at 500ghz or something
(You'd need memory, or at least a cache, that could keep up I guess)
Note silicon (probably any semiconductor) is about to hit the wall in terms of feature size. An obvious answer is to stack logic elements in top of each other but it is already difficult to extract heat from 2-d silicon chips. If superconducting gates really use 1000 times less power that stacking might be possible.
Personally, I want to own a SQUID[1] or two for some experiments, which is otherwise FAR outside my budget. They've been made with HTS, I see no reason why they couldn't be made with this.
The chemistry and processes can be made to be compatible.
So, in theory you could assemble a device with multiple SQUIDs on it, sampling the A field[1] in 3 dimensions, instead of the B field (the Curl of the A field) that is usually measured, just for one instance.
https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
Rebranding is often a bad smell, such as “Facebook” to “Meta” or “Twitter” to “X”.
In a few weeks there will be serious attempts at replication and probably some consensus in a few months.
They are reporting a material which does not have high performance in terms of maximum current, those samples aren’t going to outperform traditional conductors. Somebody might figure out how to make higher quality crystals, there may be enough details that you’d need to license several patents to make something useful.
Liquid nitrogen superconductors were discovered in 1986 but were very slow to find applications. Liquid nitrogen is easy to handle (we could demonstrate magnetic levitation in our high school physics lab) and nitrogen is an abundant element (most of the atmosphere) compared to helium which is common in the universe but rare in Earth. People thought it would be a revolution but it wasn’t. There are practical applications of them but when they build new power lines they almost always use ordinary metals.
Now it could be the other way around, the effect is real, people are able to make a high performing material at an affordable price, people solve all the practical problems, etc. Or it could be this round of materials is “close but no cigar” but in 10 years there is a real breakthrough. We don’t know at this point.