ELI5: Why is the recent LK-99 superconductor news a big deal?
ELI5: Why is the recent LK-99 superconductor news a big deal?
Why is the recent news around the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor such a big deal? What material impact would those findings have on electronics and modern technology?
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For example, you can resolve a lot of blockers of scaling quantum computers based on superconductive qubits.
My 5 year old appreciates this very clear answer.
Well obviously
Quantum computing needs to be cold to avoid thermal noise from destroying coherence. A room temperature superconductor probably doesn't enable room temperature quantum computing.
I think that if you can scale your physical qubits easily you will be able to use all the power of error correction codes. Even a thousand of physical qubits per one logical qubit should be feasible if you do not need to support superconductivity by helium coolers.
Error correction relies on the majority of values to remain unchanged. I don't think that assumption holds for qubits at room temperature. I'll admit that I'm not well read enough to be certain.
Room temperature superconductors would be great for a lot of applications, but I don't think they do that much to enable quantum computing.
Afaik superconducting quantum computers are operated well below the critical temperature for copper. They wouldn't go through that extra effort if it wasn't necessary.
But it might help in general right? Less resistance means less thermal noise?
At the temps needed, regular copper is superconducting.
It could be helpful in some of the intermediary stages to reduce heat production, but it's not going to be a major linchpin for quantum computing. They'll still need cryostats and liquid helium cooling.