this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: Why is the recent LK-99 superconductor news a big deal? (self.explainlikeimfive)
submitted 1 year ago by AlmightySnoo to c/explainlikeimfive
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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.