LK-99: Where are we going? Where do we go from there? How do we want to go? What will we learn from it?

LK-99’s purported superconductivity drew immediate scrutiny from scientists. Inna’s initial impression was ‘no.’ The unIdentified Superconducting objects, as they are sometimes called, show up consistently on the arXiv. There is a new one every year. Advances in superconductivity are often touted for their potential practical impact on technologies such as computer chips and maglev trains, but Vishik points out that such excitement might be misplaced. Historically, progress in superconductivity has had tremendous benefits for basic science, but little in the way of everyday applications. There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says.

We could still potentially see some of the things that a room-temperature superconductor is supposed to usher in, even if it’s never discovered. Think of perfectly efficient superconducting electricity grids and more powerful medical imaging machines. Those developments might depend on more incremental improvements to make existing superconducting materials cheaper to manufacture and easier to deploy.

Other preprints have since been published on arXiv from research groups that say they’ve made samples of LK-99 and have not found it to be a superconductor at room temperature. He points to a quality specimen from India that he says is sensible and good quality.

“If it can’t be manufactured, it’s a laboratory curiosity — one that will win a Nobel Prize — but it’s still a curiosity. It is a long way from a material that an engineer is going to buy and put in his machine, where you can get excited about a physics experiment. The man says so.

Some of the big institutions haven’t yet released their results, including the researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory. We’re going to have over 100 labs within a week or two that will do various types of research. So it’s going to be clear pretty quickly,” says Larbalestier.

“That’s just not good for the field. It makes most of us very, very cautious when it comes to claims and case where people can not reproduce their data. Mason says. Science can be done by reproduction and the ability to be open with each other.

The Rochester Superconductors, Redd Matter, and Black Holes: Response to the Rochester Paper and Comment on “Injecting Copper with Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Lorentzian Metals”

The Rochester researchers tried again. Another paper was published in March on a superconductivity made from nitrogen, hydrogen, and rare earth metal lutetium. They called it “reddmatter” after a fictional material in Star Trek that forms black holes. That paper is still under scrutiny, especially since one of the key researchers from Rochester faces separate allegations of plagiarism and data fabrication in his other work.

“This discovery is completely out of the blue,” says David Larbalestier, chief materials scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and professor at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. I don’t have an idea what the idea was, of injecting this mineral with copper.

The Southeastern University team’s experiment produced X-ray diffraction data that is more consistent with the Korean team’s sample, according to Palgrave. But several researchers have questioned their claim of achieving zero resistance at -163 °C. Evan Zalys-Geller, a condensed matter physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that the resistance measurement wasn’t sensitive enough to distinguish between a zero resistance superconductor or a low-resistance metal like copper. (Members of the Southeastern University team did not respond to a request for comment.)

Grovenor points out that the researchers didn’t perform a heat anomaly test that’s standard for major laboratories studying these kinds of materials. He says that superconductors which have ever been proven to be superconductors show this specific heat anomalies. “If there is no specific heat anomaly, it ain’t a superconductor.”

There were some discrepancies in the data, the two preprints disagreed. Three authors named in one paper and six in the other are at odds with each other, according to reports. An author of a paper told New Scientist that the preprint with fewer authors contains a number of defects. The author, William & Mary physics research professor Hyun-Tak Kim, also said that the preprint was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. The authors of the papers did not respond when The Verge reached out to them.

That makes the efforts we’re seeing now to try to duplicate the findings in those preprints crucial. The other issues give experts pause. They raised a range of concerns in interviews.

Superconductivity in a Fork Suspended by a String: The Fork-Like Effect Revealed in an Online Phenomenon

Uncertainty about the structure of LK-99 limits the conclusions that researchers can draw from theoretical studies, which assume a given structure for the material to make calculations.

The scientists are fed up with the hype and want to mimic the videos with everyday materials suspended by string and other props. “I opened Twitter up one day and noticed a bunch of sketchy videos with little floating pebbles,” says Eric Aspling, a physicist at Binghamton University in New York. In response, he uploaded a video featuring a “sample of LK-99 shaped as a fork” suspended by tape. He says he thought, “How can anyone be convinced by this?”

There are still speculation online about the limited success of the replication attempts. Unverified videos of samples, supposedly levitating because of superconductivity, have circulated as viral evidence, despite the fact that many materials — including graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.

Schoop says the feature doesn’t mean the material would show room-temperature superconductivity. The association between flat bands and superconductivity comes from other materials, such as ‘twisted’ layers of graphene — slightly offset sheets of atomically thin carbon — which displayed superconductivity at -271 °C (1.7 K) and featured flat bands. This doesn’t give evidence of superconductivity in the lead-based LK-99.

Source: Claimed superconductor LK-99 is an online sensation — but replication efforts fall short

An X-ray Spectroscopy Study of LK-99: Evidence for Flat Bands in Lead Phosphate

Griffin agrees that knowing the structure is essential. The structure found by the Korean team is very similar to other lead Phosphate minerals, she says. It is not too strange to think that it is possible.

There were other theory papers that mentioned the presence of flat bands, but all of them had the same assumption about the structure. She says that she doesn’t believe in the DFT before she knows the correct crystal structure.

On July 31st, a theoretical analysis was posted on a social media site. Sinéad Griffin, who studies quantum materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, shared her theory paper, accompanied by a gif of former US president Barack Obama performing a ‘mic drop’. The optimism was prompted by Griffin’s use of DFT to find that LK-99 has ‘flat bands’, a feature that indicates electrons in the material are strongly correlated with each other. “Flat band systems tend to show interesting physics,” Vishik says. When a material is predicted to have a flat band, people are excited.

But Robert Palgrave, a chemist at University College London, says that both teams’ materials differ from the original. Both X-ray diffraction patterns are significantly different from the Korean team’s patterns and from each other, says Palgrave. (Members of the Beihang team did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.)

A co-author on the National Physical Laboratory team, physicist Veerpal Singh Awana, acknowledged small differences between their sample and that of the Korean team. He says the LK-99 is very similar to the LK-99 that was reported.

To confirm that material’s structure and identity, replicators used X-ray diffraction, an atomic imaging technique. The sample was found to be very similar to that of LK-99.