There’s a ton of electromagnets that are super cooled (like single digit K cold) so that it can maintain a large magnetic field. While this is only the first step, pretty much any application that does something similar can be replaced with this room temperature super conductive material.

Not only products would be impacted but experiments too, particularly particle experiments. All colliders need some sort of ridiculous magnetic field which uses a close loop helium chiller.

Long term wise, anything that uses electromagnetic fields would be impacted, like motors and generators. You in theory can get stupidly efficient motors (99%+) motors with super conductors.

Here's a few from the top of my head:

- A global power net. No solar power during the night? Just produce it on the other side of the planet.

- A superconducting computer. Less resistance when pushing bits around = 500x less power consumption.

- A Superconducting magnetic battery. Store power indefinitely with high efficiency.

MRIs would be another revolutionized field. Cooling is a big size constraint and cost driver. You would still need a large amount of power if you want to have clinical scans at 3T or 5T, though, but in wealthy countries the number of MRI machines would for sure proliferate and it would probably become more routine. Low-resource environment deployments may become a tad more feasible, to be honest the power requirements will still probably be too high, but at least you wouldn't need an always-on source.

In the immediate short term, the power level supported is too low for the real shiny applications that everyone talks about.

But the main one that is screaming at me for this technology sitting in front of us is SQUID sensors and RF antennas that will operate in the lower power range of the potential applications spectrum.

I mean, it depends a lot on how ductile a final product is. High temperature superconducting "wire" took a long time to become realistic. If you somehow made a ductile and inexpensive wire out of it then it's going to be everywhere (and lead poison everyone for generations, but that's progress for you).

Of course if you can make wire out of it, I wonder how much smaller your fusion reactor can get?

There are a lot of applications for even a thin film, consider spray coating a resonant cavity with it.

I'm sure there is a way to improve almost anything you could think about if you start talking about making CPUs with lower heat dissipation, perhaps enabling 3D designs and much more efficient computing... [edit: obviously there is a limit from literally the entropy in computing and transistors are most of that, I wonder if the superconductor is a good thermal conductor...]

I'm sure there are at least 222 startups that have some idea they're pitching right now ;-)

A lot of people are talking about very cool practical use cases, but I'm here just thinking 'all of our trains could float, wouldn't that be neat?' [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev

Lots of systems with bulky and expensive cooling (think MRI scanners, e.g.) could become vastly more accessible.

Wildly improved efficiency on some sensors, antenna, motors, etc.

Explosive weapons chargeable to any yield. Take a loop of superconductor charged to the desired current, then warm it beyond its critical point, dumping the electrical energy into immediate heat. A 120mm tank shell is in the 10s of Kilowatt-hours. No more special chemicals, just this lead based super conductor and 20 minutes on an EV fast charger. Don't forget to take it off the charger!

I think it'd be valuable for anything that conducts electricity, and where resistive losses are significant or where strong electromagnets are desired.

So, long distance electricity transmission, motors, generators, MRI machines and magnetic confinement nuclear fusion reactors for example.

That said, the material as synthesized might not be very good for some particular application. The current handling capacity might not be good enough, or it might not be physically strong enough to use as motor windings.

I don't know enough to do the comparison, but I'd be curious how this new material holds up when compared to copper or aluminum wire in terms of current capacity, weight, strength, and cost of materials. One of the big reasons for skepticism about humanity's prospects for converting to a non-fossil-fuel based energy system is that there just isn't enough of the important metal resources to build all the batteries/EVs/transmission lines/solar panels/windmills we need. I myself am skeptical of the skeptics because I think the resource bottlenecks are overstated and there are usually acceptable workarounds, but I do think copper is going to be in very high demand over then next several decades. If we have a good, cheap copper alternative then that solves that problem. (It also introduces another, as we would then have to deal with enormous quantities of lead-based cabling.)

As far as I can tell the critical field, the maximum magnetic field it can withstand before turning into a regular conductor, is relatively low at 0.3 Tesla. In superconductors like YBCO, it's often more than 100 T. If critical field cannot be increased this will limit applications.

Near term may be useful for devices which take advantage of quantum effects such as Superconducting QUantum interference devices or SQUIDs.

Use in microelectronics may be possible, but is likely quite difficult. Making complicated structures out of this material will require radically new microelectronic manufacturing processes. HTSC microelectronics don't exist as far as I can tell.

If critical field can be improved things get interesting. If it can be increased to that of known HTSCs at liquid nitrogen temperatures(critical field scales with temperature), that's interesting because this material should be cheaper.

If it can be increased moderately at room temperature, there is the potential for it replacing rare earth magnets because the material should be cheaper.

Video games will be more realistic.

> what would it revolutionise?

"Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” --Venkman

Well for starters, you would never have to hear that awful fan noise from your computer :)

I would build a drone that levitates indefinitely.. for a starter.

Fusion.

I’m just thinking aloud here but would this enable actual perpetual motion machines? For instance, wouldn’t the pushback from the quantum locked superconductor be an infinite source of energy?