Quick research note (7/30/23)

I've been reading through this (very interesting but not yet validated) paper on room-temperature ambient pressure superconductors: The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008). The paper’s results are not yet validated, and may well not be; we’ll see - but if they are, this development will be exciting.

What I found particularly interesting about the paper is it includes a new theoretical mechanism for inducing superconductivity to explain why LK-99 would superconduct at room temperature and pressure. The authors’ claimed theoretical mechanism for inducing superconductivity is inducing strain in the crystal lattice (mechanically, by substituting specific atoms with others) to create quantum wells where the electrons can move without impediment. This is very interesting because:

  1. It would unify the observed domains of low-temperature and high-pressure ceramic superconductors with a central theory of creating quantum wells through mechanical stress, no matter whether temperature, pressure, or structure is used to create it, and
  2. Making quantum wells is now relatively easy; we do it all the time - solid state laser diodes like the one in your cat's laser pointer use them. I did some Physics work in semiconductor quantum wells some time ago: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HZbd7XY6oJoTmt

Engineering quantum wells into glass fiber

If the results are reproducible and the lattice-stress explanation holds up, I think it's going to be very interesting to see if the theory can be applied to make superconducting cable out of fiber optic cable with sufficient dopants. If this could be done, it would allow creating long superconducting cables using (modified) existing fiber optic cable manufacturing infrastructure. It's not clear if this would work. On the one hand, glass is an amorphous solid not a crystalline solid, so it may be difficult to engineer mechanical stress into it. On the other hand, we are very good at doping glass and can engineer its band-gap precisely for signal propagation. Could we engineer it to produce a quantum well across the contiguous fiber to allow for superconducting transmission? It seems a potentially promising research area.