Open-ended research grants to anyone with moderate training in experimental science to just throw shit against the wall and try every last possible combination of something, without concern for 'publish or perish' or jockeying for status in academia. Lets get our smartest and most dedicated technical people back in labs rather than off making CRUD apps for 10x academic wages.
If this discovery is true, we just got lucky. Based on the story we know of LK-99 it almost didn't happen, and our current system is not set up to make these kinds of discoveries quickly. Throwing billions at 'just go find stuff that matters' basic research is ultra cheap in comparison to humanity not having a high-tc superconductor.
* Green energy suddenly becomes way more viable. Megaprojects in the most efficient sites can send energy long-distance and store it with effectively no loss, somewhat mitigating regional variations (especially if we have a high-trust world order where a united global grid is viable). (I read LK99 might have some limitations carrying lots of current but presumably other approaches would do better)
* EVs: improved performance of motors, batteries, charge time, and weight - huge shift for the market. Much safer than most current car batteries too.
* Big breakthrough for computing in the form of fast, cool, and efficient zero-resistance transistors. Step change for cutting-edge component performance, all the cloud hyperscalers would completely revamp their compute. TSMC / ASML probably get huge volumes of new orders.
Obviously the first bet is following the patents. Otherwise, my play would be the industrial companies that build things that build things, like factory automation companies, followed by companies that would see a surge in demand from products incorporating room-temp superconductor technology, like TSMC, ASML (maybe Apple/AWS).
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/783712 (770 GHz toggle flip-flop in 1999)
https://www.physics.sunysb.edu/Physics/RSFQ/Projects/WhatIs/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O6GpFCIxv0
...and...
Storage would help, the cheapest production cannot run continuously.
Superconductors could make transmission lines much more compact, sturdy, weatherproof, and less vulnerable to sabotage. You could run a thick armored cable instead of a set of open-air wires on tall towers.
We will still need some step-downs, because current density is limited. But we will need fewer of them, and they won't need the monumental cooling they have now.
I agree that the nature of this is entirely different to transmission losses, but I don't expect 230V lines carrying tens of thousands of amps. This would probably require excessive amount of SC material.
Generating costs are a small fraction of the final price of electricity, taxes and transportation are the big ones.
If you just look at superconductors as a replacement for any old piece of wire you're going to miss out on a whole bunch of advantages, it is a clear qualitative difference which enables solutions that are entirely undoable today. Yes, there is HVDC, but the lines are expensive and due to the high voltages involved are not easy to interface to or from. They do have some unique advantages, being DC they allow non-synchronized grids to be connected.
The whole "plate a desert with solar power and solve the world energy problems" doesn't work because the desert isn't where the power draw is. Superconductors hypothetically permit the African desert to supply Europe with power.
As this goes from science to engineering, we may find other issues with that plan, beyond the obvious expenses (for example, current limits can be handled with more wires, but if the current limit is sufficiently small that's still a problem, this is no solution if the superconducting bundle has a hundred square meter crosssection), but superconductors at least put it on the table. Conventional conductors do not.
If it’s brittle as f, then it limits its applications for example.
Compared to the steps that have been happening in the last decades this one would be absolutely incredible in terms of temperature range, if I understood it correctly they aren't even sure about the upper limit due to a restriction in their measuring gear.
edit: I understand that typically this is biased out with diodes...but the matching is not perfect and it is easier to start with half the distortion.
but mostly, a lot of early guitar pedals used germanium components, and so they are associated with prestigious historic guitar players.
here's a video demonstration. silicon first, then halfway through they flip the switches and play the same circuit with germanium components.
Seems my headphones can replicate it judging from hearing the audio. Am I missing something?
When you play on emulation it's difficult to know if it is faithful without having used the original.
Some musician appreciate them, others avoid them.
When you happen to finally get the real gear, you often realize it sounds better, and have a wider range of usage.
The convenience of real dedicate knobs, without menus is unmatched.
There is some pleasure with getting the real thing, and use it by yourself.
But then again there's nothing wrong with people romanticising stuff as long as it's more "valves are cool because they're retro and nostalgic" over "valves are cool because they're objectively better".
Guitarists today still use tube amps and germanium transistors (in guitar pedals) for two reasons. The first is that most guitar amps back in the day used tubes (mostly) and the early guitar pedals used Germanium. Guitarists wanted to sound like the earlier musicians that used that technology [1] so they want to use that technology to achieve a certain tone with their instrument. The generation after them wanted to sound like them, so that means old tech for them, too! Repeat until today.
The second reason is that an electric guitar is a combination of a physical and electrical system, and the distortion that is essentially synonymous with electric guitars [2] comes from pushing an amplifier out of its “intended” linear regime [3] into the nonlinear regime where it stops amplifying and starts clipping the signal. The way this nonlinear regime varies with the choice of tubes and transistors, but in general you can’t really replicate one with the other. These unique non linearities impact both the output sound and, most importantly to me as a player, the way the amplifier responds to my physical technique (e.g., how the sound varies with how hard I hit a string). I have played solid state amps that aim to emulate tube amps, and to me the biggest difference isn’t the sound but that physical response. I haven’t played the top of the line modeling amps, but this has been my main problem with the practice amps I’ve tried. As a result, if I’m not playing in my bedroom (pushing a tube amp to distort at apartment friendly volumes is hard), I play through a tube amp. The differences between silicon and germanium transistors are similar, but more subtle and I’m someone who owns a lot of pedals and is constantly switching them out to fit my mood.
[1] an interesting counter example is that the Beatles used early solid state amps on at least some albums
[2] Plenty of people play “clean” without distortion, but if you spend time on guitar forums, you see a lot of beginners who ask a question of the form “I just got my first electric guitar, why doesn’t it sound like an electric guitar?”
[3] Early on the goal was to produce high headroom amps that didn’t distort, but this was very challenging. Rock musicians latched on to the distorted sound and then that became a design feature in later amps. However, if you try to make like a 59 Bassman distort, you have to play it loud enough to kill someone. You can also achieve distortion in other ways, e.g. clipping diodes, but that’s not really germane to this discussion.