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In case you were wondering how superconductors work, this is a good explanation. They are a very interesting phenomenon and may prove economically useful, but are not a hard requirement for a sustainable energy future.
Physics has many powerful tools of reasoning to understand and predict reality. Those tools, like first principles analysis and thinking in the limit, are broadly applicable to anything, in my experience.
With Grok, @xAI is attempting to create an AI that reasons from first principles, which is fundamental if you care about getting as close to the truth as possible.
The acid test would be reaching a conclusion that is correct even if it is extremely unpopular, which means being right even when the training data is almost entirely wrong.
For example, Galileo concluded, after observing the moons of Jupiter from a telescope he engineered, that it was far more probable that Earth revolved around the Sun than the other way around. This view was so unpopular that he was forced to recant and placed under house arrest!
If you had trained an LLM on material back then, it would’ve given you the popular, but wrong, explanation. Due to social and legal pressure, it likely wouldn’t even acknowledge the possibility that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
For AI to help us understand the true nature of the universe, it must be able to discard the popular, but wrong, in favor of the unpopular, but right.
Superconductivity requires a spin-up electron to pair with a spin-down electron, so that the pair has a net spin of zero and therefore obeys Bose-Einstein statistics, not Fermi-Dirac. This breaks them free from the Pauli exclusion principle, so you can have a great many of them occupying a low energy quantum state that can slide effortlessly through the material like a ghost. Every superconductor relies on exactly that effect.
What differs between materials is the way in which the electrons pair. Electrons don’t like to pair, because of their mutual Coulomb repulsion, but in some materials they can both jiggle the crystal lattice in a way that weakly brings them together, like an arranged marriage for a couple that’s not really into each other. This is called phonon coupling, and can be modeled with BCS theory, at least… for simple crystal structures. That model predicts that superconductivity can only occur up to like 30 K, beyond which the lattice is jostling around too much because of temperature, so the pairing mechanism is disrupted.
However, there are some materials with complicated crystal structures, that get around the assumptions of BCS, and that are more robust when it comes to the effect of temperature on the pairing mechanism. For example, ReBCO, which I work with, can go up to ~90 K. This is a shockingly high number from the perspective of BCS, which is why these materials are called “high temperature” superconductors, despite still having to be pretty cold (liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K).
Anyway, the high T superconductors have more complicated and exotic pairing mechanisms. It’s no longer “simple” phonon coupling, but something that involves longer-range and more geometrically complicated details, and to this day it’s still not fully understood.
Although, the way supercurrent flows is well-understood, in all superconductors. It’s called the Ginsburg-Landau model, and is based on the idea that there’s some energy associated with electron pair formation, and some energy associated with pair-to-pair interactions, in addition to the usual electromagnetic terms. This model works extremely well, and is the basis for all superconducting technology.
One of the predictions of GL is that, when the condensation energy is nearly zero (around the Tc), there will be fluctuations where electrons temporarily pair and un-pair. These oscillations are extremely rapid, so in experiential measurements they will average out into a state that seems to be kinda superconducting, but not completely. But it’s really just fluctuating, a second-order phase transition. So that’s one cause of the transition width.
Another cause of the transition width is the purity of the sample, or lack thereof. A sample with varying quality throughout will have a wider transition, as some parts of it “turn on” before others.
With ReBCO, transition widths are typically a few K, with tails noticeable out to like a 10 K span, sometimes more. And dirty samples might have double or triple transitions, if different parts of it are oriented different ways.
Anyway, sorry for the novel of a response, but I hope that provides some context. Any Tc curve on a new superconducting sample is probably going to have quite a wide transition, for lack of sample purity, and also due to the fluctuations that thermodynamically should be there no matter what. So it seems extremely unlikely that a material which somehow superconducts at 4X the temperature of ReBCO would also have a much cleaner Tc transition.
Mega thread on how to land open source remote internships that pay in $3,000 - $10,000 USD.
Best part, they happen many times every year, and are 100% beginner friendly.
🧵
10 rules for financial success:
1. Budget
2. Buy assets
3. Marry right
4. Pay off debt
5. Invest in yourself
6. Avoid lifestyle creep
7. Cut unnecessary expenses
8. Invest 20% of your income
9. Be with business-minded people
10. Create multiple streams of income
What else?
Above everything else, never ever let a woman's looks, sexiness or status become your weakness. She will punish you ruthlessly for it.
Learn or perish!!!