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Re:Physicists coax superconductivity and more from quasicrys... by opticfluorine on Sunday October 01, 2023 @12:55AM (#37722696)
Speaking as someone who used to work in DFT (the computational side), the multiple interesting computational results showing band structures often associated with high-Tc superconductors seemed interesting. It's a long shot (because prediction via DFT, as opposed to explanation, is difficult to say the least), but if I was still in the field I would be searching the nearby material space for similar materials that both exhibit the interesting band structure, and also exhibit that structure in the most thermodynamically preferred state. To my understanding this was one of the issues with LK-99 - even though the computationalists found that possible band structure, it was thermodynamically disfavored vs another copper substitution that did not exhibit a similar band structure through DFT calcs.

That being said, even if you did find an interesting band structure with a viable thermodynamic pathway for material synthesis, it says nothing about whether it has a room temperature Tc or some lower Tc. But regardless, it could lead to the discovery of some interesting new high-Tc superconductors. Or nothing, since that's how DFT (and more broadly, basic research) goes.

I'll bet there are labs doing something similar to this now.

Re:Physicists coax superconductivity and more from quasicrys... by datameta on Sunday October 01, 2023 @07:50PM (#37732224)
What does DFT stand for here, could you disambiguate please? Because I also do DFT but it stands for Design For Test (on microprocessors).
Re:Physicists coax superconductivity and more from quasicrys... by raziel2701 on Sunday October 01, 2023 @08:15PM (#37732411)
Density Functional Theory. It's the bread and butter of computational condensed matter physicists and materials science simulations, but are mostly used as simulation to validate experimental results, rarely are predictive.