Thursday, March 9, 2023

Superconductive hype

University of Rochester has outdone itself with this release. Better keep all that hot air away from the 294 K 10 kbar superconductor they've brought to Nature.

Don't get me wrong - 294 K is great. It's a nice spring day in Denver. The pressure is however... not so Coloradan. 10 kbar is a gigapascal where we're 100 kilopascals and Venus(!) in the low megapascals.

Where would we even use this, where gigapascal pressure is cheaper than just buying some liquid nitrogen? The New Yorkers say - where you need magnets at high(ish) temperatures. They came up with the tokamak, for magnetic containment of a fusion reaction. Well maybe. Assuming we even wanted to do that anymore.

To sum up I do not see where the gigapascal superconductor justifies the volume of fanfare which Rochester has blasted for it.

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