I think this is mostly a propaganda piece from Cornell's PR. The land of superconductivity is full of over-promising and under-delivering, but truthfully you could say that about most research papers nowadays. The bottom line is that we've seen all these great promises that "X material will help us understand superconductivity better" but we're still pretty much holding the same level of understanding since BCS theory plus or minus some theoretical framework for type 2 superconductors. We have increased the library of materials that are superconducting though.

So the reality is that we haven't really found a new technology with our current library of superconductors, and I think that's the proof in the pudding, we're not there yet but boy is the field set for disruption. The hot application that pretty much every new paper on superconductivity will mention is superconducting qubits, and the search is for one that doesn't suffer much from decoherence, which is where spin-triplet superconductors appear to be candidates for.

I haven't kept up much with the quantum computer world this year due to covid, but at least as of last year everyone seemed to still be using Al as the superconductor instead of one of these more exotic alloys and compounds. That is what I mean by proof in the pudding, if someone can make a technology out of the material, then that's real, that's progress. Until then, most of these pieces released by university PR departments are just hype.

This is of course merely the opinion of an empiricist skeptic who finds peer review to be flawed, and that believes that the filter of time is best for determining what's real progress. Sometimes it can take us 50 years to go from discovery to application.

Ok, I guess I'm not surprised. I'm usually suspicious when the story is published on a .edu because it seems like it's often just marketing.

It's a big deal for material scientists studying superconductivity but irrelevant otherwise, at least for now. Theoretical research on superconductivity practically hit a wall decades ago and there's been little to no progress despite significant amounts of effort and countless world changing applications like MRIs, NMRs, particle colliders, etc. A third type of superconductor might provide the missing data we needed to make real progress and unify the different types of superconductors under one theory.

This discovery is definitively cool, but not close to the phosphine-on-Venus cool. The present paper is similar to the former finding in the sense that what looked like a natural explanation (a p-wave order parameter) seems to have been ruled out (just like chemical origin of phosphine seems to have been ruled out). Hence, more exotic findings might lurk in this material.

They say the transition temperature is 1.4 Kelvin, so I would guess that a new type of superconducting material is exciting, but this particular material does not hold much promise as a high-temperature superconductor.