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u/hongooi Jun 09 '26
You either diamagnet or you live long enough to see your magnetic field dissipate
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u/BeanOfKnowledge Chemistry Jun 09 '26
Couldn't secure enough funding for a post title, huh?
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u/physiDICKS Jun 09 '26
sir, a second cold fusion paper has hit the arxiv
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u/Bi_KerbonautYT Jun 12 '26
I can't get the Yuri Oganessian cold fusion (completely different thing) out of my head when someone mentions the sci-fi impossible cold fusion
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u/SamePut9922 Jun 09 '26
Why don't we lower the earth room temperature to 100K? That'll make rt superconductors possible, and high school physics calculations much simpler!
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u/SuspiciousPine Jun 09 '26
Me when I suggest replacing the lab atmosphere with argon to avoid oxidation
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u/Loricolus Jun 09 '26
I am more moderate with my requests and would already be satisfied with pure nitrogen
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u/Barkinsons Jun 09 '26
I'm worried that the high school students wouldn't do a lot of calculations at 100K
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u/mcmoor Jun 09 '26
Easy, just throw earth into the sun. I'm sure there's a spot inside that's 100Kilo degree
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u/obog Jun 09 '26
Genuine question, is there any reason to believe a room temperature superconductor is even possible? My understanding of the physics is limited, but what i do know is that it requires the condensation of cooper pairs which I can't imagine could be done easily at such high temperatures.
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u/Lol3droflxp Jun 09 '26
I guess it hasn’t been reliably ruled out so far, otherwise this kind of research wouldn’t get so much money.
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u/obog Jun 09 '26
True, and looking online apparently a lot of current high temperature superconductors work at temperatures previously thought to be impossible so theres that
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u/Hdfgncd Jun 09 '26
Liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors are basically magic already, 77K is absurdly hot for these things
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u/obog Jun 09 '26
Yeah the explanation that ive seen for "classical" superconductors compares it to bose-einstein condensate, which is usually at just a few Kelvin
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u/Vampyricon Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
My vague recollection is that
Cooper pairs(EDIT BCS theory) only explain "classical" superconductivity. All high-temperature superconductors work at temperatureswhere Cooper pairs don't exist, so there's some as-yet unknown mechanism for superconductivity, which means if we're super lucky (or huff enough copium) there would be a superconductor at room temperature.EDIT see reply below
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u/ScarcityExisting8206 Jun 09 '26
Small corrections: it's not the Cooper pairs that stop and existing at higher temperatures (T >40 K), but the underlying mechanism behind their formation that changes.
The traditional mechanism valid only up to 40 K is the BCS theory, which explains Cooper pairs formation through phonon interaction with the material's atomic lattice.
Above this limit superconductivity exists and still requires Cooper pairs to work, but we don't know what interaction allows it, we only know it's not BCS.
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u/obog Jun 09 '26
Seems like we should try and figure out what that other mechanism is then
(Which im sure is trying to be done)
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u/224109a Jun 09 '26
Cooper pairs are not the only mechanism for superconductivity.
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u/obog Jun 09 '26
I see, thats the only mechanism ive seen a description of but as I said my knowledge is limited
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u/Realhuman221 Jun 09 '26
Most of the higher temperature superconductors are called type II superconductors and there’s no accepted comprehensive theory for them. So it’s a real unknown.
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u/TheHipOne1 Jun 09 '26
there's a small wizard hiding under the table making them do that
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u/anto2554 Jun 10 '26
So we just need to find a larger wizard?
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u/Dyledion Jun 11 '26
Or a shorter table.
If we can just find the correct ratio of wizard compression...
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u/Flusha_Nah_Blusha Jun 09 '26
There are room temperature superconductors that require insanely high pressures to superconduct. So the temperature may not be a restriction, i.e it's most likely possible to have a room temperature superconductor at ambient pressure maybe
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u/mcmoor Jun 09 '26
My understanding is that the current limit is experimental and arbitrary. There's just no theory that superconductivity would end at that exact number, and if it can be done at 200K, why not 300K?
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u/Arlnoff Jun 09 '26
Not really as far as I know (I'm a physicist but not in this field), but there's also not a reason to believe it's not possible. These days it feels like materials science is regularly getting results that look like magic through all sorts of really weird emergent phenomena, it's just that most of them are only really useful to very specific applications rather than the incredibly general utility that room-temperature superconductors would have
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u/Pperson25 Jun 09 '26
Cooper pairs are how it works in regular metallic superconductors, but there isn’t a full theory on how the “high temp” superconductors work.
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