If there was a viable low cost superconductor that worked at temperatures up to 50 degrees Celcuis and atmospheric pressure, the implications would include:
- way less heat generated in electronics, so faster and more efficient CPUs, GPUs and memory.
- power transmission without loss. Very long range power transmission becomes viable and low cost (buried cables near roads?). For instance, solar energy transmitted in real time from where the sun shines to where it is dark or cloudy.
- a major obstacle to fusion power is removed as superconductors make it much easier, lighter and smaller to use magnetic fields to confine plasma
- medical imaging and scanning gets much cheaper as, for instance, MRI machines get smaller, lighter and simpler.
- mag lev trains could become the lowest cost way to travel by rail. Maybe even cars and trucks become maglev and roads are replaced by magnetic rail.
In a few weeks there will be serious attempts at replication and probably some consensus in a few months.
They are reporting a material which does not have high performance in terms of maximum current, those samples aren’t going to outperform traditional conductors. Somebody might figure out how to make higher quality crystals, there may be enough details that you’d need to license several patents to make something useful.
Liquid nitrogen superconductors were discovered in 1986 but were very slow to find applications. Liquid nitrogen is easy to handle (we could demonstrate magnetic levitation in our high school physics lab) and nitrogen is an abundant element (most of the atmosphere) compared to helium which is common in the universe but rare in Earth. People thought it would be a revolution but it wasn’t. There are practical applications of them but when they build new power lines they almost always use ordinary metals.
Now it could be the other way around, the effect is real, people are able to make a high performing material at an affordable price, people solve all the practical problems, etc. Or it could be this round of materials is “close but no cigar” but in 10 years there is a real breakthrough. We don’t know at this point.
However there is one application that would likely be able to overcome any basic engineering or cost/performance challenges and get built relatively quickly (~3-5 years timeframe), in my opinion: The development of very small, room temp SQUIDs [0] for use in small, portable fMRI-type machines. Think a helmet you put on and have the ability to monitor spatial brain activity at very high resolution and without the need for massive liquid helium cooled machines. The machine in link [1] would be able to potentially be shrunken down into something the size of a football helmet and potentially be much, much cheaper, allowing for a cascade of new research into uses of such a machine in ways possibly outside the typically niche medical research.
At best so far from my understanding, this is a new starting point and milestone not a magic bullet.
In the next months and years the focus will be on "is this useful" and "how can we make this useful". To make use of a sc you need to bring it into shapes we can use. Wires of all sizes and shapes are the big one. Can this material be made into wires like current sc (bonding to a base material to fix the brittleness) or even better can it be drawn into wires? If not, that's a new research area.
Also, we still have no real idea how high temperature sc work (there are two competing theories, but afaik neither can fully describe what we see). That's probably even more important for this new ones. A flurry of research will be into related materials, to see if we can find ones which combine the sc with better properties, but having a theoretical understanding would make this far easier than just randomly poking at materials.
So, assuming we get to the state of usable room-temp sc everything else depends on the price. The lower the price the more they can replace until in the last instance all cables, coils and everything could use them (this will probably not happen for a very long time if ever). In the nearer future they could replace all of their predecessors in places where they are used today: In MRTs, in the LHC and comparable machines, fusion reactors, various cables, some small energy storage systems using them already. Such things.
They also could solve the biggest remaining obstacle for renewable grids based on wind and solar (storage) by allowing far better SMES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
Who knows where we'll go from there, but I think that's enough food for thought for the moment.
A room temperature superconductor will have different properties, maybe it can handle a higher magnetic field or not, we cant yet say. But what we do know is that the current limit to building HTS magnets is no longer the superconductor, but the strength of the supporting material which is steel. Find a stronger material and you can build a stronger magnet. A superconductor, better than current HTS, won't change that.
I don't expect anything until the results are replicated, multiple times, and confirmed in the peer-review process.
The reason is because while yes, the PRC produces and uses a lot of hydrophones, their range is a function of how noisy what they're detecting is, and US subs are very, very quiet. Networking and advanced signal processing can help, but only so far (and generally more with accuracy than sensitivity). SQUIDS are different, and exactly how far away they can detect a large metal body underwater is classified, but RTAPS would undeniably significantly improve their sensitivity and thus their range, meaning that whichever side can deploy and maintain a network of them (signal processing works for these guys, too) should have very, very good visibility on where any large bodies of metal are near their network, underwater or not. Both the US and the PRC would be able to capitalise on RTAPS for building SQUIDS, and both could base them in westpac (off the coasts of Japan, PH, Taiwan, ROK for US, eastern seaboard and their actually controlled islands for the PRC). So they both benefit from this technology and it's a wash, right? Wrong, both sides having this technology dramatically harms the usability of submarines in general, and the US is significantly ahead in submarine technology and submarines play a pivotal role in US naval doctrine, so this technology would significantly reduce the relative advantage of the US military compared to the PLA, which does not have submarines that are as militarily effective and whose offensive force structure is based around massing fires largely from the mainland, rather than using submarines to screen carriers which provide fires through sorties.
Basically, RTAPS improves everyones ASW suite, which sucks for the US because they're the kings of submarine warfare and submarine warfare is a large part of how they protect their assets near the PRC and how they project force into the PRC's expanding sphere of influence.