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Superconductor breakthrough replicated twice on preliminary testing
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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So would this mean that cpus would not generate heat?
Would smartphone battery life skyrocket?
Can someone breakdown how this would affect computing?
According to the article fabrication seems to have a very low yield. That will generally make it difficult for consumer products.
I would generally assume first use would be in locations were super conductors are already used today. E. g. in MRI machines which would then not require cooling anymore and therefore could be more compact, quieter and consuming much less energy.
Other prime fields for super conductors are energy transportation from the energy producers to the consumers.
Application in electronics seems difficult for me as the material is not used stand alone there and therefore new fabrication processes and designs will be needed. After all it will not work to use this material to replace silicon transistors as our transistor designs are relying on the semiconductor nature of silicone and a superconductor cannot follow this by definition. Maybe the connections between transistors can be replaced, but I am not sure where most of the heat generation happens. If I remember my physics studies correctly there is also significant energy loss within the transistor and that would still mean that the cpu would heat up. This would be now especially critical as the temperature must not exceed the temperature where the material loses super conductivity as this would most likely lead to a fast melt down of the device.
Don't the current quantum computers also rely on superconducting materials that need to be kept sort cold?
My understanding is that they also need low thermal noise to ensure pure states. They cool much below the superconduction threshold temperature (eg typically 20 mK). So I am not sure that this would be useful for quantum computers at the moment. Magnetic field productions such as that in MRI requires high current, so that depends on the maximum current that this material can sustain before that breaks superconductivity. So it could perhaps turn out useful or totally useless. Hard to say at the moment.
"So it could perhaps turn out useful or totally useless."
That's a realistic statement. Although the MRI thing sounds cool as well. I recall last year a big grant for a big 14T mRI project was awarded in the Netherlands, I wonder if this thing will make them reevaluate their plans. Before this becomes viable in such a setting I can imagine a lot more is needed, but it would be such a typical thing that they finish building a 14T MRI and then "hey guys we just finished this superconductor pipeline and stuff is much easier/better now!"
I highly doubt they will switch plans. This current solution seems far from any real productive use.
Compare to the battery industry which has frequent announcements of new solid state or natrium batteries, but there is still much investment in "old" lithium ion batteries since they are proven to be productive and they are also approved to be used in products.
Yeah for sure, it's prolly a while until it's developed into something feasible.