It should be noted another paper was released prior to this with 6 authors, and the arXiv pre-print was dropped to 3, which is the max number of people who can win a Nobel. Which to me means the Korean researchers believe they have something here. The 3-man pre-print was published 6 hours before the conventionally better written 6-man pre-print, apparently to freeze out an author who had been brought on to help get their paper published in the Anglo-American journals.
The papers were not ready for publication.
— Ate-a-Pi (@8teAPi) July 27, 2023
Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials… https://t.co/gGRoaL3n3C
phys.org | A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in South Korea is claiming to have created the elusive room-temperature/ambient-pressure superconducting material. Their work has not yet been peer reviewed. They have posted two papers on the arXiv preprint server.
Scientists around the world have been trying for more than a century to find a type of material that would conduct electricity without resistance—discovery of such a material would revolutionize the electricity business because it would mean that electricity would no longer be lost to heat dissipation as it moves along power lines. It would also revolutionize the electronics business because engineers would no longer have to worry about heat dissipation causing problems in devices.
In their two papers, the research team describes the new material, which they call LK-99, and how it was created. It was made, they report, by mixing powders containing sulfur, oxygen and phosphorus and then heating the result to high temperatures for several hours. The cooking, they claim, led to reactions that transformed the mixture into a dark gray, superconductive material.
In their papers, the team claims to have measured samples of LK-99 as electricity was applied and found its sensitivity fell to near zero. They also claim that in testing its magnetism, it exhibited the Meissner effect—another test of superconductivity. In such a test, a sample should levitate when placed on a magnet. The team has provided a video of the material partially levitating. They claim that the levitation was only partial because of impurities in their material.
The papers by the research team have generated much excitement and skepticism in the science community. There have been other instances of researchers claiming to have found room-temperature/ambient-pressure superconductors over the past several years—all have failed to live up to their claims. The researchers on this new effort have responded to such skepticism by suggesting that others repeat their efforts to test their findings.
If their claims turn out to be true, the team in Korea will have made one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics history, no doubt leading to revolutionary changes in electronics and certainly Nobel medals for all those involved.
More information: Sukbae Lee et al, The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.12008
Sukbae Lee et al, Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.12037
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