Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Young-Wan Kwon, Hyun-Tak Kim, Sungyeon Im, SooMin An, Keun Ho Auh
Any of them win nobel prize before 2026
1,000
1.00@BoltonBailey Disagree. It's way too short a timeframe for a Nobel prize. For anchoring, last year's physics prize was awarded for work that has been ongoing for decades.
@BoltonBailey If you’re after operationalisation, try https://manifold.markets/Noit/will-a-top-brand-smartphone-feature?r=Tm9pdA
@VitorBosshard Fair point, we would expect a later year to have lead to a probability closer to 50%, but it's more clear to resolve than replication.
@BoltonBailey I went ahead and made a longer-term market:
@Noit This is good for diversification, but I don't like this as much as the Nobel one, mainly because even if I knew this material was going to be a big deal, I don't know if smartphones have cost effective uses for superconductors.
@BoltonBailey If LK-99 is as cheap to produce as has been suggested, they do. Most consumer electronics would benefit from cheap superconductors. I picked smartphones as a consumer electronics market that has consistently been incredibly competitive, so if LK-99 has consumer potential, it should show up here.
@Noit LK-99 might be cheap, but is it as cheap as whatever it would replace? How much more would you expect a smartphone made with superconductor to be worth compared to one made with today's materials? Presumably the benefit would be that it would use less power and keep charge longer. How much longer?
@CodeandSolder My layman’s understanding is that anything that gets hot where we don’t want heat is due to electrical resistance, and so would be a target for superconductor replacement, subject to the other material requirements any given component may have. If I had to guess at priorities in a modern smartphone, I’d bet the charging assembly would be any easy win for fast, cool charging. I’ve read about superconductor batteries, but I’m not sure if they’ll work on a smartphone scale. Very long term I’d expect work on superconductors in CPUs.
@Noit that is not correct, nearly all energy loss in semiconductors is unrelated to resistance in conductors. It's instead caused by effects related to the functionality of the circuit such as the need to charge and discharge various capacitances as the bits change, electron leakage and so on. (https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece322/LECTURES/Lecture13/Lecture13.03.pdf)
As superconductors are conductors they cannot replace semiconductors directly, there is no way to make a transistor out of them. There is some SC-based from ground up logic being worked on (https://spectrum.ieee.org/new-superconductor-microprocessor-yields-a-substantial-boost-in-efficiency) but the density is laughable and I have strong doubts it will improve towards applicable any time soon. Plus the material would need to be possible to shape as required and fulfill a bunch of other criteria.
Charging speed is limited by the cell not charging circuit and energy efficiency pretty much doesn't matter, the only thing it could realistically replace is the inductor which would require the ability to make fine wire out of it but the gains would be in single percent.
I'm reasonably sure SC energy storage for mobile devices is not happening this decade.
@CodeandSolder That all sounds very sensible. My counterargument is that being able to advertise “the first smartphone with Room Temperature Superconductor technology” is a big PR win, so there will be temptation to stick an RTS in where it doesn’t make a lot of sense, or for one very minor component. I think that if LK-99 is real, the things that will stop it appearing in a smartphone in the time window all relate to being unable to manufacture it at the volumes and qualities required for mass market smartphone manufacture. I may be a little bullish on that.
@Noit I mean, it's not impossible though the precedent seems preatty bearish, for example GaN transistors (which are awesome) were first made around 2000, with commercial transistors coming a few years later. And yet the first smartphone advertising its' use came in 2019 when it made sense to use it, and even that was in a charger.
I see two possible places for SCs in smartphones, sensors (potentially, can't think of any but seems possible, will nearly certainly take too long) and inductors. The latter would require figuring out a way to make the material cheap in bulk and turn it into a formable wire, make sure of the lifespan, plus sort out all the legal stuff, all in 3 years.