What is LK99?
What is LK99?
I've seen a few posts about it, and have googled, but I get conflicting results, and haven't seen anything on tradmedia.
Would someone mind filling me in?
Thank you.
It is a new material that has been synthesized by South Korean physicists that, according to them, is superconductive at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.
This would be a collosal scientific breakthrough if it can be replicated and confirmed. Other superconding materials only work at extremely cold temperatures or high pressures, making them extremely expensive and/or difficult to produce as well as impractical for widescale use.
The material itself is a lead based crystal, with some of the lead atoms replaced with copper atoms. This creates internal strain in the material that allows quantum tunneling of electrons through the material, resulting in the low resistance.
Because of some recent alleged scientific misconduct of another physicist working in this field, the scientific community has been a bit skeptical of the claims thus far. The author's originally submitted their findings to the most prestigious journals (Science/Nature) but they were not published there until they could be corroborated and replicated due to the ongoing controversy of the other physicist.
However, unlike other superconducting technologies, this material is relatively cheap and easy to produce so there are many ongoing attempts to try to replicate the results and we should get clarity soon either way whether this is truly a society changing technology, or another "too good to be true" headline.
Yeah I have stopped taking these headlines and hype seriously, we get such "discoveries" hyped up every couple of years. Obviously big if true but it's a damn big if.
LK-99 is a potential room-temperature superconductor. The Wikipedia article has a good overview, including how attempts to replicate the findings have so far failed.
It should be noted that attempts may have failed due to poor definitions in the paper which make it more difficult to replicate on the first try. It means more testing will need to be done to truly know if it can be replicated.
But also, just today someone claimed to have replicated it at a Chinese university. Now, I’m not a physicist so I have no idea if the video is legit or not but it has a lot of professionals in the field talking so I think it carries some weight. It isn’t something to get excited about yet, but also don’t brush it off as a hoax either:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/superconductor-breakthrough-replicated-twice
A Korean team claims it's a ambient temperature supra conductor (it's been 100 years that material physicists have been looking for one) . If true it's a major discovery. Remember December 2019 when we heard about a new virus in Wuhan?
However,
It has been published on arxiv, where scientists share draft paper before final publication (so you get early results without loosing 2 years in review) meaning it hasn't been peer reviewed. We talk about a major discovery, not about one more paper about quantum nanodots or a yet an algorithm to classify galaxies by shape using machine learning. In general, these ones are kept secret until publication and front page of a big journal.
To my understanding, on the recent development, one team couldn't reproduce their experiment while another concluded that theoretically speaking LK99 could be superconducting
So basically, the 3 options are
- It's a it's a fraud (but why fraud with such a high buzz tittle?)
— Paper is over optimistic but LK99 has nice property and is a milestone on the way (but again why come with such a big claim?)
— It's really superconducting, and for some reasons they had to release an early preprint (may be another team was about to publish) which would be a major discovery