To me this is encouraging. 110K is really high! It's higher than YBCO which is what they make commercial "high temperature" superconducting tape out of. IMO if this is legit (I have no way of judging the source) then this is the first good third party evidence that the original researchers are not just doing some kind of fraud. A total fraud wouldn't have actually discovered a novel high-temperature, but not room temperature, superconductor.
At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here.
I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Maybe the source isn't actually credible? Any Chinese speakers here know?
They aren't reacting because this isn't really proof of anything. The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance. Superconductivity is implied (thats the most straightforward explanation) but not actually demonstrated here. Its very hard to interpret from the limited data presented. There could be a whole host of contaminants, issue with the experimental setup etc etc. Its hard to go from look at the interesting material properties in this graph to room temperature superconductor. This is also the only confirmatory information we have from the team; their sample didn't show diamagnetism.
The reasons to be skeptical are: 1) lot of videos floating around that are just at the threshold of convincing 2) poor results from other teams 3) there is a history of superconductivity discoveries like this that never pan out 4) skepticism of the original paper
We are in the fog of war phase state of this discovery process so there are data points in every direction with the kpop X-itter drama and sensationalism thrown in to the spin for good measure. Hard to tell if this is geek meme stock phenomenon meets the Reddit Boston Bombers hunt or just the real-time globally hyper connected social media version of exactly what would have happened if social media and arXiv were around in Christmas 1938 when two German chemists noticed a flash and detected Krypton where it should not have been and the Nuclear Age began.
Usually superconductor resistance is measured using four probes: current goes through the two outer probes, and voltage is measured across the two inner probes. Then V=IR.
Lead resistance can play a role, but superconductivity is a phase transition: there's a significant discontinuity. It's not a matter of something going from 0 + e (for small e) to 0 (which doesn't happen), but one of going from x (x >>> 0) to 0. When that phase transition happens, it's obvious.
2. Yeah but, it's not a superconductor, it's just diamagnetic.
3. Yeah but, theoretically maybe, but not practically.
4. Yeah but, it's just a warmer superconductor, not room temperature.
I don't know if my sensibilities are "bayesian" or something, but while the naysayers are totally correct, their predictions are not where the trend is heading. This thing is consistently defying expectations and gradually becoming more "important" as more information comes out.
I believe if the Q-Centre team say it's room-temperature SC, then given the evidence so far I expect to get closer to that conclusion over time. If it fails, then I think it'll fail for very good reasons, not simple error or incompetence. At this point, fraud is totally ruled out.
If you want to benefit from dubious and/or fake research, you'll have to be a lot more subtle about it.
Announcing you just found the holy grail will get you all the attention in the world, attention you don't want if you just forged the paper to advance your career.
I'm still unclear. Why is the test limit 110K? If this is supposed to be usable at ambient temperature then this seems like not a useful finding. Is it just some artifact of how superconductivity is measured?
Some people say they can get it to work at room temperature, and others say they can't.
Testing a sample at superconductivity-friendly temperatures helps figure out whether there's something to investigate here, since most materials do not superconduct at any useful temperature.
Most materials are not superconductors at 110K. If this one is, it is possible Koreans did not fake room temperature results but rather their sample is slightly different for some reason, maybe pure luck, maybe some part of process that they didn't clearly define or that their precursor materials have certain impurities.
It is apparently extremely difficult to fabricate LK-99 and most of the time the process being used creates similar substances but without appropriate Cu substitution in its lattice. All of the videos have been of generally quite small samples and the manufacturing difficulty is the purported reason.
The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.
I thought the original hype around LK-99 was that it was supposed to be easy to manufacture with materials most labs have on hand? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106
Amusingly, some friends asked me about it shortly after the original announcement. I'm not a superconductor person, but I am a materials person.
My response was, basically, the biggest risk (after toxicity) "is that they got lucky and there are subtle things they did that aren't in the recipe which will turn out to have been critical."
I've done a lot of materials research. It's pretty likely that they got lucky on a small percentage of the samples and spent years trying to figure out what on earth was different. I am excited that 10,000 other labs will stand a very good chance of finding out.
Exactly my take. The big question for me is whether or not they haven't accidentally included some contamination that makes all the difference or whether or not the geometry of the placement of the atoms is controlled tightly enough and whether either of those is going to make a huge difference in the outcome. And then there are a hundred different process errors that could have similar effects. This could take a while to be nailed down.
- It was naive to think a simple recipe was going to play out with everyone getting what they wanted easily when they tried to follow it.
- It's still a huge deal if the manufacturing is as easy as it appears to be, even if most of the replication attempts aren't getting _quite_ the right thing. It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.
> It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.
Is it, though? I mean it's hilarious sure but if we were to draw parallels to the mother of all elements, the celestial furnaces in the sky, it seems less wild.
It's extraordinary how many replication experiments are happening so quickly and how tantalizing the results are. It would be optimistic to say the original research was just going to unlock this tech for everybody at once but even if it's the clue that leads to dozens of refinements that eventually lands on a winning material then it's still a landmark event.
The consensus of this forum was absolutely that it's super easy to manufacture, any chemistry youtuber can do it, and that we are going to know whether it works or not within 48 hours.
I wonder if the people who steered the discussion just pretended to be experts or what happened. Where were the people who now in these threads explain the reasons why it is really difficult to bake? Or are those the same users?
Probably people who knew above average about the process and sourcing materials to realize you just had to throw some common stuff in a furnace but without being experts in material science.
Even then if it's tricky to do its most likely because the process is not well know/refined yet
The other day, about a third of top posts on hn where about this. I got the impression there was an organised campaign by the believers. The usual healthy skepticism was buried beneath the cheerleaders. Most top comments where along the lines "I never believed it. Until now".
The common understanding seems to be that producing true LK99 is very difficult as you need to get the crystal structure just right. Many samples probably have mixes of the correct and other structures. That's why some float and some don't. The sample might be quite "dirty", meaning the critical temperature is lower.
Seems like it may depend on getting specific binding sites.
> Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity, namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample. [1]
I believe 110K is where it hit zero resistivity (the lower bound) but any increase from there and it was no longer presenting superconductivity.
If we are to trust the SK team, it's possible the design in the paper is outdated and in-house they have dialed it in to something stable at room temperature.
For non-Chinese speakers: one can jump to 01:50 and 02:32 of the original video, the key figures (XRD and resistance) are presented with English captions.
The data look legit although there is a curious dip in resistance in Fig.3(a) between 200K and 250K. Fig.3(b) is also a bit weird as somehow the resistance behaves irregularly with magnetic field strength.
Since IMO this makes fraud a less likely explanation, and it seems easily possible to me that there are many materials in this family with different critical temperatures, and it seems really unlikely that the original researchers would correctly measure superconductivity but simply get the temperature wrong by more than 200K, then it seems strongly positive to the probability that the original researchers discovered room temperature superconductivity. Not confirmation, of course.
What's impressive to me is how simple making it is. There are still low hanging scientific discoveries that are out there but that we haven't figured out yet.
>At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here.
I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially.
Probably we'll see some niche applications in industry after a decade of further refinement, but I'm not holding my breath for hoverboards any time soon.
> I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially.
That's kinda how science goes. The first free-electron laser was built in 1971. It took decades to develop and commercialize free-electron lasers and we still in the early days.
It is rare for a single discovery to revolutionize everything especially in the 21st century. Typically it is a series of discoveries in a row that taken together allow new processes and technologies. Each discovery on that road is important.
The short term impacts of discoveries are overestimated, the long term impacts are underestimated.
On a 50-100 year time scale, the perception of graphene may be very different from what it is now. We are looking at a tadpole and saying, I thought these eggs were suppose to hatch into frogs, not tadpoles.
The history of the laser makes for fascinating reading. Moreso because the longer they looked the harder it was to find things that were candidates that they couldn't get to exhibit the effect given the right conditions, but some of those were so extreme that they would have been discarded outright in the early days.
The idea originated with Einstein in the middle of WWI, and it took until 1960 for the first working device to be made with lots of incremental progress in the middle. After that it's been a non-stop series of inventions each of which gave rise to new practical applications and new avenues of search. Originally described as 'a solution looking for a problem' it turned out that indeed, it was the solution to a lot of problems, we just didn't realize how applicable this tech would be.
It’s worth pointing out that graphene literally is just a single layer of graphite. Making macroscopic objects out of graphene would mean layering them. So effectively we already have graphene in the form of graphite fiber (also called “carbon fiber”).
Graphite with zero defects and perfect crystallinity has the same properties as graphene. It IS layers of graphene.
(This is all essentially true for carbon nanotubes, too, which are just tubes made of graphene… maybe graphene is more chemically reactive due to the ends of the sheets though.)
I think the rule of thumb, though, is that most things don't turn out to be viable, and then most viable things are only barely useful due to constraints. But occasionally they DO occasionally come up with world-changing technology.
Dark example, but the atomic bomb for instance was a dramatic improvement in our capacity to destroy things: night and day difference.
My guess would be that it'd be similar to silicon wafer production and just require lots work to industrialize the process and hone production. Graphene is just particularly difficult due to its 2-d nature, but lk-99 looks to a regular crystalline structure.
What prediction markets are you looking at? Are there any concrete examples of these markets being accurate, or just a venue for gambling addicts to feel smart?
> Are there any concrete examples of these markets being accurate
There are prediction markets for US elections, which tend to be pretty good. In general you should only expect markets with high liquidity to be very hard to beat, and the US elections have relatively low liquidity, so IIRC Nate Silver still outperforms them (but only by a small amount).
The reason you should expect high-liquidity markets to be hard to beat is that, if they were easy to beat, you could easily get rich by betting on them. So the common-sense idea of "there's no easy way to get rich" implies that they cannot be easy to beat.
The main exception to this principle is when there's a huge amount of money that intentionally places "bad" bets on the market, usually because they want to hedge against something. (e.g. I don't want this to happen, so I'll bet that it will happen, that way at least if it does happen I'll make some money.) This is why the TIPS spread, which can be interpreted as a prediction market for US inflation, consistently over-predicts inflation. Entities that stand to lose from high inflation use TIPS to hedge, which causes the TIPS spread to be too high. This could be corrected with better market design, but the treasury hasn't done that yet.
One prediction market company spent a day spamming e v e r y tweet with a link to their own stuff, so it's adopted a meme-y link to LK-99 but it's honestly unrelated other than a clever marketing campaign
And my reply still stands, if not read for signs of an adversary, you would read a comment that reinforces (B) of the (A) and (B) you offered people to reply with. Its for gambling addicts
If it's for gambling addicts who know very little then it shouldn't be that difficult to make money on it (not necessarily on LK99, but in general).
Either the markets have more insight (swarm intelligence or agents who know more leveraging their knowledge) than me – and in that case they give me some information – or they have less insight and in that case I should play them.
YBCO is used in cutting edge Tokmak fusion reactors like SPARC. I'm not sure how an 18% increase in allowable temperature would change how much closer you could move the magnets to the plasma. Squinting at Figure 1 in [0], it seems possible you could get significant increased in Q from 18% increase in temperature.
> I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting.
Where can we look at prediction markets on this? For those of us who aren't familiar.
I'm very curious -- because unlike sports scores or political elections, this seems like such a hard thing to define a prediction market around, because what is the exact threshold you're defining and what is the threshold of proof of that thing and on what date is that decided?
Those rules are defined in the actual bet. I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that.
I looked closely because I very much wanted to bet tens of thousands of dollars on "no", but I couldn't because I'm in the US. The two outcomes would be I'd make a lot of money or humanity would make the biggest breakthrough in generations.
> I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that.
That doesn’t sound like a sufficient market resolution condition. Surely it would need to be something like “declared by specific Party X to be a room-temperature superconductor” where Party X is sufficiently trusted by all market participants.
Thanks. And wow, that's as fuzzy as I was afraid it would be:
> ...Willing to adjust this criterion after receiving more info from relevant theorists/experimentalists...
> ...I don't intend to require that replications be published in a peer-reviewed journal... However, I do intend to wait a few weeks/months to resolve so that any pre-print can be adequately investigated...
> ...Since high Tc superconductivity is not my specific field of expertise, I'm willing to defer to a consensus of subject matter experts on whether a pre-print is convincing or not, and I am willing to contact some beyond the usual twitter personalities...
In other words, if there's any kind of gray area in the results, it's going to be whatever this person decides, whenever they want to decide it. Definitely not something I would ever put money behind.
Everyone agree. Oversimplifying, there are 3 categories to classify the initial team:
1) A bunch of clowns.
2) Interesting
3) Next Nobel prize winners
I think they had a good reputation in the community, so the opinion of the hivemind was to discard 1. But there was still the possibility of a honest mistake or something weird.
If this post is correct, other team confirmed that they discovered a new family of "high temperature" superconductor. The old families have been tweaked and explored to death. A new family gives a lot of room to optimize the composition and building process. So perhaps they found it.
If this is confirmed they are definitively in the "interesting" category, at least.
I disagree. First, there have been many RESPECTED scientists who have thrown it all away for fraud. This happened RECENTLY with retracted papers on near-ambient superconductors so you should be wary. Just like cold fusion claims. So it’s possible at least one of these did, too. Another possibility is they fooled themselves (see Feynman’s quote) and maybe one of them faked data to help garner credit.
Secondly, there is no middle ground here. If it’s a room temperature superconductor like some of their data showed, then it’s Nobel Prize.
From my understanding the first paper was published without authorization. So it was likely they were not ready for it to be published. So 2) still seems possible to me. Like what if the team was it seems like we have a room temperature super conductor we need to do more work to be 100% sure though, and then someone then just goes and publishes your rough draft. It could still just be something interesting, and not fraud.
-EDIT-
Like if the first paper was not released as is let's say after their testing it turns out to not be room temperature and ambient pressure. They could have easily revised their paper to be about new class of super conducting material ect.... or just not published the paper if it was dud.
I agree that 1) is not discarded, it's never discarded. From scam to honest mistakes, sloppy handling, weird unexpected things, ... I'm just saying that if I has to guess, it's probably not 1).
There is middle ground. They may have discovered a new kind of (not room temperature) superconductor that is an achievement. It's good to publish a few papers, but we would not be discussing it all week.
Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). That's not room temperature unless you live in Antarctica and forgot to close the window. But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.
> Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.
I suspect this will make MRI machines much cheaper than they are currently and will radically improve the healthcare for many.
You got me thinking about the viability of superconductor-based EV motors that are cooled by compressed gas refrigeration; drink chillers might come standard on EVs since you'll be having beefier compressors than for just climate-control
It’s easy to make a high tc superconductor have lower tc through poor production quality. It may very well be that a poor sample is 110K while a high quality sample is >400K.
110K actually makes me excited as someone with a physics background. It seems more realistic, and there's always the possibility of finding full room temp later, too.
That could still be possible. We haven't found the ideal form of LK-99 yet, so another lab might have a form which is only stable to 110K, but that doesn't mean all will see the same thing.
Theory is shit (betraying my bias here). If someone released a paper that theoretically proved a material was a superconductor from first principles, I would ignore it, every bit as much as I would if it had the opposite results. In materials, experiment has always led theory. Theory has use in suggesting new angles to explore with experiment, but theory is fundamentally reactive: get new data, try to fit that data using known principles and math. It's simply not equipped to say whether reality is real or not.
Honestly, I think anyone who thought the DFT-based papers mattered at all doesn't really get how science works. The politics here is also worthy of keeping in mind: if a theorist comes out and says something is flat out impossible, he/she gets egg on their face if it turns out to be possible. If someone says it's possible, there's plenty of wiggle room to justify yourself if the material doesn't pan out (plus, if it does, you get lots of credit for offering the first theoretical explanation).
>Honestly, I think anyone who thought the DFT-based papers mattered at all doesn't really get how science works.
It's a very spicy take to say DFT-based papers don't matter at all. Anyone who thinks they conclusively prove or even provide particularly strong evidence that LK99 IS a RTAPS or a superconductor at all is misunderstanding, of course, but there's a lot of room between "doesn't matter at all" and "doesn't provide strong or conclusive evidence"
They propose some theoretical ways in which LK99 COULD be an RTAPS. If we couldn't even come up with theoretical ways it could do so, then that is obviously a bad thing for the idea that LK99 could be a superconductor.
I agree with your general sentiment, just not the level of it.
I have little to add other than I f---ing love your spicy take :D
...and agree with most of it. Yeah ofc I know results lead theory in all physics esp materials... :)
Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious?... the fact that it just so happens that if you plug the numbers obtained by experimentation into a current reasonable model, HUH, SOMETHING INTERESTING! That's huge. No, I don't think that's a non-result, and (intentionally using the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in place of a real argument) Dr. Derek Lowe agrees, so we know how science works. ;-)
Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"? (your sentence 1-5 I couldn't agree more with)
> Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious?
Mostly tipsy facetiousness. I mostly wanted to mock the people who thought the DFT analysis was strong evidence that LK-99 is actually a superconductor. Of course, real-life theorists (and experimentalists) know that the advance of science is a progressive dialog between the two groups.
> Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"?
Politics in the sense of getting (positive) recognition. It's absolutely possible for someone to use theory to hypothesize whether LK-99 is a superconductor (RTP or otherwise), and that attempt provides useful predictive value. But someone posting a negative result from that faces more risks than a positive result: the positive case always has an escape hatch (e.g. other factor wasn't accounted for). Experimentalists are lucky, in that escape hatches--e.g. the exact method to reproduce wasn't known to us--are always available to the negative case, because experiments are so messy.
You know why. The guy probably rants about the ccp or putin every day. Sound like anyone you know? I wish dang would do better handling the obvious rampant flamebait.
@dang flamebait alert. Please climb up thread to find the offending party.
At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here.
I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Maybe the source isn't actually credible? Any Chinese speakers here know?