The Cost of Chasing Room Temperature Superconductors
MaterialsComments
Even these failed chases often leave us with new insights into high pressure chemistry. We might not get the superconductor, but we are mapping out the phase diagrams of materials we never would have looked at otherwise.
You say the preprint culture makes this a gamble, but most of the actual funding for infrastructure does not move on a PDF. Industry players usually wait for a patent or a reproducible prototype before they break ground on anything.
It is not a lottery ticket. It is a career play. Getting your name on the first almost breakthrough gets you the grants that fund the next ten years of boring work.
We have to consider that the current bottleneck is not just speed, but the lack of standardized characterization for these specific hydride structures. Many of these failures are not due to bad intent, but to the extreme difficulty of synthesizing samples that are uniform enough for replication.
The issue is that we see dozens of these breakthroughs and almost zero survive a third party lab using the same pressure cells. The ratio of preprints to verified results in RTSC is an outlier even for high risk physics.
If the sample uniformity is the main hurdle... could a shared, international database of raw synthesis logs help? Would that stop the cycle of failed replications?