LK99 room temperature superconductor

updated summary table of replication efforts by someone on forums.spacebattles.com

What are the implications for IDM?

hands free knob twiddling

TLDR: Humanity seems to have stumbled upon an almost-impossible superconductor material that is like a power-up that will potentially unlock fusion reactors, super efficient electric motors, quantum processors and (unfortunately) super powerful hand-held rail guns*.

Efforts to replicate the results of the original korean team and make and test the material are happening right now, livesteamed on the internet in a truly collaborative nerdy way.

In the lead and spitting fire and materials science wisdom and generally not giving a fuck is a russian marxist junior researcher no-ones ever heard of who's cooking this stuff up (apparently in her own apartment) and giving advice to the other teams.

* all of these things might take several decades

Lol as if humanity has several decades 

The easiest way to understand its implications that I've read is that, if true, it would be like the invention of the transistor, which made modern computers possible.

  On 8/1/2023 at 11:46 PM, zazen said:

Efforts to replicate

'efforts'

call me up when there's multiple reproducible suxxesses

  On 8/2/2023 at 2:52 AM, auxien said:

call me up when there's multiple reproducible suxxesses

Skepticism is good and room temperature super conducting more than warrants it, but there seems to be more going on this time. Take this HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36965812)

  Quote

I got my PhD studying band structure of high-tc superconductors (experimentalist, ARPES). These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re: all the cuprates). (Note: I specifically worked in a lab that was measuring a lot of the d-wave character / gap-energies of various superconductors)

All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real superconductivity after seeing multiple different labs compute similar band structures. The video of multiple directions of magnet showing some levitation also inspires a lot of hope

I’m not knowledgeable about this field at all, but over the past few days people who claim to be have repeated stated this LK-99 thing may actually be interesting.

https://www.heise.de/news/Schlechte-Nachrichten-fuer-Raumtemperatur-Supraleiter-9232993.html

Don't look too good

superconductor? I hardly know her!

  On 8/2/2023 at 6:43 PM, Limo said:

Skepticism is good and room temperature super conducting more than warrants it, but there seems to be more going on this time. Take this HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36965812)

I’m not knowledgeable about this field at all, but over the past few days people who claim to be have repeated stated this LK-99 thing may actually be interesting.

i'm not in the know on anything even close to this field either....but nothing about this passes the sniff test to me. random people online claiming to have done so (but then being super shady about sharing/explaining) is a red flag in and of itself. then the whole spat with the actual authors, the errors in the paper, etc..... rule of 'if it seems too good to be true, it probably is' is heavily advised with 'revolutionary!' things like this. they rarely, rarely, rarely turn out to be true.

and as for South Korean revolutionary science.... check this out for a taste of the national culture's influence on scientists (which is only part 1 of 2):

not posting that to shit on the country or it's scientists or anything of the sort, just saying there's a history there of pressure to produce outstanding results....or at least there was in the past, could see that sort of thing contributing to things like this.

  On 8/3/2023 at 12:51 AM, IDEM said:

https://www.heise.de/news/Schlechte-Nachrichten-fuer-Raumtemperatur-Supraleiter-9232993.html

Don't look too good

  Quote

Grundsätzlich bedeutet das jedoch nicht, dass LK-99 ein Irrtum oder ein Schwindel ist. Zurzeit bedeutet es lediglich, dass zwei Gruppen, die sich nach eigenen Angaben genau an das Rezept zur Herstellung des Materials gehalten haben, bislang bei der Reproduktion der Ergebnisse gescheitert sind.

The Indian group didn’t follow the recipe, apparently

Didn’t know about the other one, though.

But the original team too has a hard time actually making the material (something like a 10% succes rate) so maybe that’s why  the Chinese team couldn’t reproduce the results.

  On 8/3/2023 at 1:42 AM, auxien said:

just saying there's a history there of pressure to produce outstanding results....or at least there was in the past, could see that sort of thing contributing to things like this.

Yeah, I think that’s the reason the first version of the paper was uploaded with a different list of contributors than the second version (which also had some corrections of obvious flaws). Probably something was made public when it shouldn’t have (the 99 in the title tells you how long they’ve been working on this).

Anyway, it’s all a fun diversion in a time without other, more relevant news.

You'd expect a lot of failures in the attempts to replicate because the recipe for the material is a bit vague

But there have been a few partial replications (its hard to actually test for superconductivity on tiny grains of rock but the floats-above-a-magnet-at-either-polarity thing is a proxy for that) and someone has confirmed that it behaves as a superconductor at 110K (very cold but actually warmer than most superconductors) so thats a start. The hope is that the 110K sample can be improved on and maybe room temperature is possible.

(NB in video captions 'extraterrestial super islands' is a machine translation error from chinese, as you could guess from the context its supposed to be 'superconductivity'. This is funny because in Avatar 'Unobtainium' is a room temp superconductor and does actually lead to floating extraterrestrial super islands)

So I understand the skepticism because these "team discovers world changing science thing" announcements usually turn out to be a mistake (I remember the cold fusion one from 1989)

But this one has the whiff of actually-might-be-something-interesting

  On 8/1/2023 at 9:30 PM, zlemflolia said:

hands free knob twiddling

I've seen the 18+ side of Aliexpress. This technology definitely already exists.

  On 8/1/2023 at 10:11 PM, zazen said:

 

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LOL on a few levels @ understanding the existing research being "the Soviet technique."

For a good overview without all the hype and internet drama and an explanation of what LK-99 and how it works Ars Technica now has a writeup: 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/whats-going-on-with-the-reports-of-a-room-temperature-superconductor/

Update: there’s now a paper that shows the material sort of half-hovering over a magnet is not, as first thought, proof of superconductivity. Instead, this effect has been shown to also occur in materials that are definitely not superconducting.

As most of the evidence of LK-99 being superconducting was this half-hovering over a magnet, this does not bode well.

Ah well, summer is almost over anyway.

Edit: the paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03110

RIP indeed.

Nature has an interesting article on what LK99 turned out to be and why it wasn’t a superconductor but looked to people like it may have been. Interesting and surprisingly accessible read to close off an interesting summer diversion:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7