The path to room-temperature superconductivity

26:19might be some roadblocks, right? Maybe they're doing construction on the interstellar highway. I kid. >> Maybe. Maybe. Our last story, one of my favorite almost things that happened that did not happen yes is about room temperature superconductivity. And this is out of the proceedings of the National Academies of Science uh from a combination of universities including MIT, Harvard, Columbia University of Houston, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution, uh Graz University of Technology and Intellectual Ventures. And this was a programmatic paper that lays out a roadmap for achieving one of the pinnacles of I guess would

27:01you say engineering and science intersection of the two, which is the idea of this creating a room temperature superconductor. That's right. This is not a This is not a proper science article that we usually cover. This is in fact a perspective article. So a lot of times scientists will get together and they will write effectively an opinion piece about where the field should be looking at and how the field should be structured for future advancement. And this is one of those, okay? It's in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's a strategy paper that assesses the current state of research for room temperature superconductors and then sets out future directions. So

27:42superconductors are these materials that have zero electrical resistance. Not negligible, not next to zero, but because of fundamental quantum mechanics it is literally zero. The resistance of these electrons moving through this material is literally zero because of some very fundamental, very cool quantum mechanics that is going on. Now that could transform our society. More than I think any other technology that I can really think of. A very base example would be if we could have room temperature superconductors or high temperature superconductors we can transfer electricity and power with

28:23almost no dissipation. >> Mhm. Right? Um the problem with modern day superconductors is they either require extremely low temperatures. So even colder than liquid nitrogen sometimes. Or extremely high pressures. If you want to get to high temperature like room temperature, you got to like stick it inside a diamond anvil cell where like you're squishing stuff inside of a diamond and then finally you like make um something that is superconducting, right? If we want industrial scale applications, we need something to be superconducting like on the table. >> Yeah, right. You know? Right. And so there's a prediction challenge, which comes from our ability to predict new

29:04superconductors. Now, that has advanced dramatically because we figured out a lot of the material science and the fundamentals of how to, you know, simulate these things in a computer. Now, what this paper is proposing is a shifting of focus towards like thermodynamics and synthesis modeling. Okay. Because a lot of times when we try to predict new superconductors in our computer programs, those can't be synthesized Uh through the normal processes. It's like you've given me like the recipe, but I have no way of cooking this thing. You've shown me that unobtainium is a thing, but I don't have the root ingredients to create unobtainium. Exa- It's like It's like what are we doing, right? And then there's an engineering

29:46challenge because we've got all these different knobs that we can turn in our lab, things like pressure, things like the nanostructure of light. Let me just say that again. So, there's also an engineering challenge, right? Because we have these various knobs that we can turn in our lab, things like pressure, things like the nanostructure of the material, light, lasers, just like pile a bunch of lasers on it, right? To control that superconductivity, but our ability to predict how each of these knobs affects that material is pretty limited,