The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor may have been developed.
According to the authors, the LK-99 material can be prepared in about 34 hrs with extremely basic lab equipment (a mortar & pestle, basic vacuum, and furnace). These results could be replicated within days or weeks.
Superconductivity would be a game changer in a lot of areas. 🧵
There are a bunch of public attempts at replicating it right now, including at least one person who's livestreaming the whole thing, and the first of those attempts should be complete within the next day or two. So in short order we'll know if it is true, out to a few weeks if the first attempts are rushed and flawed but later ones come back successful. If no one at all manages to replicate it within a few weeks, then either there's fraud, critical errors in the paper's tests, or if they actually do have a room temperature superconductor sample then the method they described is wrong and they stumbled upon it without understanding why or how it formed.
I'll see if I can find it. I saw it last night but it was just a feed of the furnace cooking so I didn't watch more than a few seconds before closing it and moving on.
This is what I saw linked on reddit, though I don't know anything about the person streaming and right now it looks like the chat is just people spamming ASCII art: https://www.twitch.tv/andrewmccalip
Ngl the whole thing seems kinda sus to me
The fabrication process feels almost too simple to be true
The highest temperature superconductors before this were very hard to prepare compounds where crystals have to deposited with very specialised techniques
And these guys were able to produce this massive breakthrough like this?
The way they explain the reason for room temperature superconductivity doesn't seem particularly convincing as well
Hmm apparently theres a 3rd paper besides the 2 on arxiv thats much more detailed and is peered reviewed but its in korean and not yet translated
Guess we'll find out soon enough
Either a giant breakthrough or a giant hoax either way its gonna be interesting
quantum computers could, in theory, break modern encryption techniques. If it is anything, this might actually put crypto in the ground.
I hope not. Not only because I want this result to be true, but because of how damaging it would be for trust in science if it's another hoax or a shit result that they jumped the gun on to get publicity.
That sounds amazing! Although with some uses being medical, it's not hard to imagine it being exploited for easy profit rather than for lowering costs to the public benefit.
Very nice that the actual recipe is publicly available. At the very least, that can't be undone.
Apparently they patented the compound back in 2021
https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20230030188A/en
The actual material itself is not very useful for industrial purposes the critical current where superconductivity breaks down is too low for shit like maglev trains
But if the principles for superconductivity were identified correctly someone else could find an analogous material to this that can operate at a higher current
so 4 hour work week soon?
