Why is the recent news around the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor such a big deal? What material impact would those findings have on electronics and modern technology?
Why is the recent news around the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor such a big deal? What material impact would those findings have on electronics and modern technology?
I’d like to add to your excellent ELI5 explanation that removing the walls also means that super conductors don’t generate heat. Normally those people would bounce off the walls and all that bouncing makes the room warmer. They’re also wasted energy - you pump those people into the system, but all they do is make things warmer with their stupid bouncing. Since lots of electrical components will melt if the temperature gets too high, this also means you have to either waste power on cooling equipment to keep things cool, or limit how much power you pump into the system to ensure the rooms don’t get too hot.
This heat generation is putting some hard caps on current hardware designs and speeds especially for computer components.
But if you could build computer components with superconducting circuitry, it would firstly use a lot less power, and secondly you could make it go much faster without risking cooking the components. So for personal devices and PCs, this would have huge potential.
Stupid bouncing people! Thanks for expanding on my comment. I hope they explain this potential discovery for those who don’t understand it.
most of heat generated in CMOS like in every digital chip since 80s comes from transient shorting of source voltage during switching between states. you can’t help that with superconductors. You can decrease heat load by either lowering voltage (bad for stability below some point), lowering frequency (your phone/pc already does this when needed) or making the transistors smaller (hard but worthwhile) and improving chip design in general