It’s official: LK-99 isn’t a room-temperature superconductor | TechCrunch
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Here's how scientists concluded that the room-temperature superconductor isn't real, showing the scientific process still works, at least.
  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The glimmers of hope that kept the story in the news for weeks appear to be the result of impurities in the original samples.

    Dozens of studies published in the last week or two have coalesced around the conclusion, less than a month after a sensational preprint paper was published by a team at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a small company housed in the basement of a modest apartment building in Seoul, South Korea.

    The Korean team made waves when it published preprints on July 22, claiming to have created a material that exhibited superconductor-like properties at ambient temperature and pressure.

    What’s more, the material was made of plebeian ingredients: lead, copper, phosphorus and oxygen.

    A video released by the team showed it partially levitating above a magnet, and when probing it for electrical resistance, they noticed a sharp drop around 104.8°C.

    In most cases, that’s not a problem; preprints have allowed many fields to move more quickly than the traditional peer-review process allows, and most scientists aren’t making outlandish claims in their preprints.

    The original article contains 313 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • EliseEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      What exactly is meant in this case with impurities?

      • @TheRieperEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        In condensed matter physics, impurities refers to impurities in the lattice structure of the material, usually due to trace amounts of other elements or even faults in the crystal structure.

        • EliseEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Ah thanks. Don’t mean to ask too much but could you explain how this invalidates the results? I mean if it works at room temperature it works right? Even if these other elements are rare earth it would still be a breakthrough, right?

          • @TheRieperEnglish
            3•1 year ago

            Good question. My understanding is that impurities can create behaviors in materials which mimic some superconducting indicators such as levitation and sharp resistance drops, but without key indicators such as zero resistance and Josephson effects.

            Notably, the original paper only showed behaviors that indicate, but doesn’t prove, superconductivity. Several pure samples have been found to not exhibit those behaviors, so consensus is that it’s a case of impurities mimicking superconducting behavior.