The most strongly diamagnetic materials that aren't a superconductor are bismuth and pyrolytic carbon, a graphite-like material.
Bismuth has a density of about 10g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength (X) of -16.6 x 10^-5. It won't levitate above a magnet because it's just too heavy.
Pyrolytic carbon has a density of 2g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength of -40 x 10^-5. Thin sheets of this lightweight material will levitate over strong magnets, provided the magnetic field alternates in a chessboard pattern.
LK-99 must be similar in density to bismuth, and the videos (like below) show large chunks of it levitating. If it's not a superconductor, it's the most diamagnetic room temperature material ever seen, by orders of magnitude.
And on top of that, if pure diamagnetism were at work, the samples would have to slide off the magnet. They wouldn't stay there and float. It's similarly unclear why the material seems to always float at an angle. It seems to track the field lines in some way.
Yeah, I think unless the authors are deliberatly misleading the public (which is of course a possibility, though not very likely I think) it is hard to imagine a scenario where all of this won't turn out to be highly interesting in one way or another (even if it might turn out to not be a superconductor)
I really doubt there’s intentional fraud here, but they were forced to publish (or pre-print to be pedantic) early. [0] This certainly led to less rigor.
> It's similarly unclear why the material seems to always float at an angle. It seems to track the field lines in some way.
I've seen some people talking about the LK-99 samples only having these properties locally due to internal structure or something like that, could that not explain the angle if one part of the sample had more "pockets" of material with these properties than another part?
LK-99 is a quasi two-dimensional material, and one which seems particularly challenging to synthesize in a bulk polycrystalline three-dimensional mass. Even the original researchers stated that they'd "get it right" only a fraction of the time, and that their famous floating cracked-disc is still impure.
I think that there's no reason to assume that negative results right now are conclusive, whereas positive results are strongly indicative.
My reading of the situation was that they have been making this stuff for quite a while (years!), but haven't had the funding or manufacturing expertise to start scaling up and properly improving the process. They are a tiny research lab. The suggestion seems to be that one newer (now former) member of the lab just thought F-this we need to publish, get it out there and start moving forward.
If it is real, the level of investment in finding ways to make this stuff is going to explode. It may be hard to make, but that won't stop us from finding a way to make it on a large scale if it truly is revolutionary.
Further to that, from other groups studying it we will potentially find better and easer to make alternatives.
Where did you get that "(years!)" from? Is it just a conclusion you came to or are those actual facts. If so, I would love to see a source or a direction to where to look for it.
They first submitted a (rejected) paper to Nature about LK-99 in 2020, 3 years ago - that we know.
The 99 in the name comes from the date the lab was formed, 1999. Some sources suggest that they have been studying this exact material since 1999, although I don't think that is confirmed.
I think it's safe to assume that they would have been making it for at least 1-2 years before the rejected Nature paper, although potentially significantly longer than that.
So they have been making it somewhere between 4 and 24 years...
Looking at how small the fragments are that other lambs are creating, I assume it's taken them years to get to the point that they can make larger lumps of the stuff that have any sort of uniform structure.
They seem to have been trying to perfect it before publishing.
According to Wikipedia, Q Centre was founded in 2008. LK-99 is called LK-99 because it was discovered in 1999, but they stopped working on it for the bigger chunk of the 21st century.
The Korean press seems to indicate that's when their mentor professor passed away and asked them to continue research on a theory he had, they've been slogging away on it since.
It wasn't discovered in 99. That's when two of the researchers were in university and had a professor who had a theory that something like it could work. They took a good amount of time off from it while they worked at other jobs, before starting at their research center.
From the NYT source linked on the Wikipedia article:
> The name of the material comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the year 1999, when they say they first synthesized LK-99.
I guess it depends what you mean by LK-99. They didn't have any luck with their early batches and it wasn't until after an extended break in adjunct professorship and industry that they got back together. A happy accident happened where they bumped it part way through trying to synthesize it and they got a sample with some of the properties that kept them going. So in 99, they were just following the advice of their mentor who was a professor. The NYT coverage is misleading in that they weren't really sitting on room temperature and pressure superconductors for 20+ years.
Katalin Karikó was working on mRNA vaccine technology for decades on a relatively tiny budget, and was turned down by many larger groups based on the supposed impossibility of the concept.
You have to wonder how many future technologies are languishing right now in some basement lab where a couple of frustrated scientists are making do with a shoestring budget and are desperate to get their research published.
There is nothing 2-dimensional about the Apatite structure, and the preprints I have seen do not show any kind of “quasi two-dimensional” structure. If anything, it’s more like an array of tubes and chains, more 1D than 2D. Do you have a source making this claim?
I think the lower the dimensionality, the harder it is to align pieces. For 3D material you could probably just grind your impure sample down into a powder, isolate the grains that levitate, and press them back together. That wouldn't preserve structures in 2D though, let alone 1D.
> I think the lower the dimensionality, the harder it is to align pieces.
First, you’re not talking about synthesis anymore. And if you try to grow a single crystal, how easy it is to get polycrystals from powder is not really relevant. Ease to synthesise and ease to assemble are very different things and both are controlled by different phenomena.
Also, again, not really. Graphene is quasi 2-dimensional and very easy to bunch up and form graphite, for example. Boron nitride, not that much.
> For 3D material you could probably just grind your impure sample down into a powder, isolate the grains that levitate, and press them back together.
You can do something like that (hot or cold pressing), but it still requires the right material to be synthesised in the first place. It works more or less well depending on chemistry and physical properties, not dimensionality.
Separating “grains that work” and “grains that don’t” is not something we really do when we create materials. It sounds more like QA in semiconductors than something we’d do in a lab.
> That wouldn't preserve structures in 2D though, let alone 1D.
Why not? If you grind a 2-D structure joint you just get flat grains. How well they assemble depends on their properties.
The whole discussion is not very productive: however truthy it sounds, dimensionality does not control how easy it is to synthesise a material. Apatites are very easy to make. Things like chalcogenide glasses are easy to make despite having a 1-dimensional structure at the atomic scale. There are many other examples. And, also again: it does not matter because apatites are fully 3-d structures, with linear elements if you squint and ignore how these elements are placed in the overall structure.
there it is! enough arm-chair theorizing by computer "scientists", an actual material scientists! or condensed matter physicist, or crystallographic expert, or inorganic chemist...
I'd say that positive results are only strongly indicative if they contain some property that absolutely can not be explained any other way (like the full levitation of that badly sourced video that we can't be sure abut the veracity) or if they are numerous enough to rule out rare effects.
Outside of that, positive results only weakly imply LK-99 is real.
Doesnt LK-99 crystallize in the perovskite structure? That's very 3D. I think cuprate superconductors do too, but I'm guessing, cause it's a long time I was into that sort of thing. What do you mean by "quasi two-dimensional". Every crystal has 2d planes (apart from rare penrose-style quasicrystals) and many crystals are anisotropic. People don't call these "quasi two-dimensional" afaik.
Hey, what does this actually mean? Like, space is 3D and I don't think you're claiming all LK99 samples are all literally-one-atom-thick, so clearly it's a 3D object.
I'd guess it means that the material has very regular layers, but (much like graphene) I've never actually seen someone directly say what "two-dimensional material" means 3-dimensionally.
Think of it this way: in something like copper, atoms are arranged in a 3d lattice, and electrons are able to jump (or "tunnel") from copper atom to copper atom freely in any of the x, y or z directions because the lattice looks the same in each direction.
Some more complex materials do not have this symmetry, and the ability of the electrons to tunnel is much stronger in some directions than others. In many known high temperature superconductors electrons are more or less confined to move in a 2d plane (even though a lump of the material is obviously a 3d object) so they are called "quasi-2d".
In other materials they are confined to move in only one direction, which seems to be the case with LK-99
I see many comments wondering why the original authors do not reveal their synthesis process.
The reason is simple. They work for a private company. Not a university. Not a public lab.
They do not reveal the process for the same reason than openAI does not reveal its process. It is because they are sitting on a quadrillion dollars opportunity and they want to grab it.
Similarly as OpenAI, many initiatives are trying to make an open source alternative so they have a risk of not profiting from their extraordinary invention.
I understood that they have disclosed the process, and are actively advising some of the groups to support replication.
However, they acknowledge that the process is difficult to get right and claim that they have had to run it many times to get the results that they are claiming.
I don't have any clue about materials science, but I can imagine why this would be the case.
Wait, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't patents only valid in the country they are filed in? So to be able to enforce a patent, you'd need to have filed in the US, Europe and China(?). Also patents take a couple of years to get accepted...
Filing in juridictions worldwide is a routine process when you apply for an important patent. Any respectable patent lawyer should be able to deal with it.
But you have to choose to do it and there is an additional cost, if I am not mistaken. When our startup filed our patents in the US market, we chose not to do the same in Europe...
Sure, and most large corporations with worldwide influence do it automatically.
The last action one of my previous employers took was to send me payments for a patent I'm named on when they filed it in the EU. I had already quit, but it was easier to just send me the check than to cancel it :-)
Good point about that! Obviously there are alot of big players like that. However I heard this was a small lab, so I guess we don't know yet what their patenting power is.
As far as I know, there is no such thing as an international patent.
What is called an international patent is just a standardized application so that only one national patent office has to examine it. If it is accepted, other national offices will grant the patent much more easily since the hard work has already been done.
And here, there is an international application, so what I think is that there is already a patent in Korea, but it is still pending for other countries.
This is likely just one member of a family of related compounds that exhibit the similar properties. I am unsure how broad the patent is, but I suspect there will be a race to find other members of this family of related compounds. Some may be easier/cheaper to synthesize or have more stability/longevity. Some members of the family may even have larger rangers where they exhibit SC.
That's how patents work though. That's the whole deal.
Private entities invest in research and development. If they find something incredible, they release the full details to the world of what they found, and in return we give them monopoly on the invention for a period of time. That's a patent.
Take away the incentive and private entities won't invest in research.
The public appetite for investing in basic research with government funding is pretty low. So instead of waiting 20 years for the patent to expire, during which we're all paying a premium on the invention, we instead spend 20 or more years without the invention at all because no research was funded to find it. Maybe longer.
I know that's how patents work. That's the problem.
I don't believe private entities wouldn't invest in research if it wasn't for patents. But I also don't care. If the private sector won't invest, let the public sector invest. Just don't keep innovations out of the hands of humanity.
Patents aren't just an incentive to invest in research: it's (moreso, even) an incentive to also disclose that research.
So yes, in a world with patents, private entities would still engage in research, but what would they gain from disclosing the details of their process?
It is extremely rare that actionable, reproducible information comes out of the patent process. In general, they provide as little information as possible in order to satisfy the office, which is extremely overworked and (by design) rubber stamps everything that has basically the correct headings and formatting and isn't too similar to an existing patent.
In the case of drugs, it works. The day a patent expires, you have generics that instantly lower the market price. Replicating a drug from a patent is not free but you know that the compound works and can be synthesized. It's much cheaper than doing original research where a drug candidate can fail after you invested a lot into it.
3. Are long enough to provide enough profit to pay back the investment
But it's not clear that they're short enough to encourage further rapid improvements. Like, suppose a patent lasts 20 years but would still be worth pursuing even if it lasted only 5 years; that's 15 years of public development opportunity lost, for each patent.
Currently, the system is that the government declares "X years" by fiat. If it's too short, then corporations can lobby for longer patent durations. If it's not too short, then corporations can lobby anyway. This is a functional but mediocre system, and there's clearly room for improvement.
I agree. This might be worth optimizing. In case of drugs, you can easily spend the first ten years in research and testing, while paying the patent fees. Software or manufacturing patents, on the other hand, might get different time frame.
That's generally because other companies figure out the synthesis themselves in that 20 years timespan, not because they got accurate synthesis instructions.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. But the generics researchers know exactly what they're trying to make. And they don't have to prove that their drug is better than the standard of care. Just that they synthesized the right thing.
>So yes, in a world with patents, private entities would still engage in research, but what would they gain from disclosing the details of their process?
They might not gain, but the people working for them would certainly gain from moving to other employers who needed their "expertise".
20 years isn’t that long. The point of patents is to quickly get secrets out into the public while still incentivizing people to make them known.
In this case this tiny company doesn’t have the resources to optimize production and has failed for years. They might eventually receive outside funding and figure it out, but they could also fail without releasing their secrets as has happened a few times.
As I understand, you don't have to disclose secrets when filing a patent. You can describe the process in general terms and omit important formulas, quantities of different materials etc.
The more you omit the less protection you receive. There’s many approaches to getting around patents and they generally work really well if you’re vague.
Revealing secrets is kind of the entire point of the patent: you tell everyone how it's done, in return you get 20 years monopoly. US patents even have a "best mode" requirement where you have to describe the best way known to you right now, where many other countries allow you to describe an inferior version and still get full protection.
In reality you can get patents granted that are somewhat vague. It's not like the patent office actually tests if the patent text is sufficient to replicate your invention.
Many ways of getting around patents, and if they can’t companies still need to sell the stuff to profit here. So the world would get room temperature superconductors if it works.
20 years really isn’t that long and more importantly it doesn’t prevent doing research or building assembly lines or customers designing systems to use the stuff. Nobody could start building assembly lines today, so the difference isn’t even close to the full 20 years here.
If LK-99 pains out they might profit from it for a decade or so while still actually manufacturing the stuff. But, the best case is companies perfecting their process and taking orders so they can start shipping on day 1 after it expires.
If this truly is the "Wunder" material no patent will prevent people from synthesizing it. Sure, commercially there would be lawsuits and blocking being able to sell a product based on it but many foreign governments don't care.
Even the US would ignore such patents if it was useful for military usage.
I think it also depends pretty strongly on what the patent says.
For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be any strong reason to believe that the superconducting material (if any) is what the LK-99 team thinks it is. For another, lead is nasty, and, if there really is a room temperature superconductor, there will be plenty of interest in finding lead-free materials with similar properties, and those might not be covered by a patent.
comments like this really make me smh. what's wrong with some lucky people getting rich off of this? you do realize they financed that research for the past 20 years, and if it's actually an investment group instead of a few passionate individuals I can guarantee you they also financed a shitload of other endeavours that went nowhere and ate the losses, lol.
you could do the same, get together with a group of other people and invest in something using your disposable software eng income (maybe you already are). or you could just complain when someone else takes the risk and reaps the rewards because you apparently have no concept of things like jealousy, envy, or basic economics lol.
Sure they could? That's a common way people get rich off of patents; make a product which uses your new innovation, sell that product, use the patent to prevent everyone else from using the innovation to make competing products.
I believe that's more or less the history of e-ink, among other things.
Humans who wouldn't be allowed to use the discovery of room temperature superconductors for anything other than whatever little gimmick the company found out they could sell.
Could you give everyone here some verifiable data? Please identify what patent you're talking about. I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.
The pleading and emotional manipulation coming from your comments is incredible.
Researchers do not owe the world the results of their research, except possibly in the case where their research clearly mitigates existential threats to all of humanity, like climate change - which clearly doesn't apply here.
I don't believe that China would let that sit tight. They will find a way to replicate in no time and start the engine of research full throttle. It's simply too good to be true. It would alleviate all their problems, from food to climate and energy.
Many things which are "toxic" can be perfectly tolerable or even necessary at certain amounts.
Some things are just truly toxic at any amount and are not good to have any amount in your body.
Your body uses Chlorine atoms in its normal processes all the time. Its essential in the function of your digestive system, the nervous system uses it to transmit electrical impulses, muscles use it to contract and extend, and facilitates the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide inside cells. Without chlorine, you just wouldn't function: your muscles wouldn't move, your heart wouldn't pump, your brain wouldn't think.
Lead is similar enough to calcium and zinc to displace it when your body makes proteins, but it doesn't "fold" the same. This causes the proteins to be less functional or non-functional, which causes a lot of further problems down the line. Also, because lead sometimes replaces calcium your body will stash it away in your bones which can make it tricky to actually get rid of.
Bleach is excellent eatin’ in appropriate moderation. (Hypochlorous acid at a few ppm is used to keep drinking water safe. Your immune system apparently makes hypochlorous acid! It breaks down in your body very quickly.)
Lead and most or all of its compounds are toxic. It’s not good for you in moderation. It’s apparently not even harmless in small amounts.
If they are restrictive and/or greedy with licensing, that is. A huge ton of cheap-ish licenses would rake in a fortune too, it doesn't have to go the e-ink way. But if it did, it might actually be worse: There's no reason why Chinese companies couldn't just ignore that patent like they do others. Pretty much unchecked innovation free for all inside the Chinese market (extending to Russia at least) vs. hardly anyone able to do anything in the West would make for an interesting situation, to say the least. Even the US Military-Industrial Complex couldn't outright ignore such a patent I think.
Yeah, I know it's not the only outcome. But the fact that it's potentially up to some random tiny group of people whether superconductors proliferate or go the e-ink route is atrocious IMO.
I hope you're right that the free markets of China and Russia will save us from the strict planning enforced on the west by the USA (... oh the sweet irony).
I mean no not at all - patents are legal tools that can be skirted around just like anything else.
If people don't respect the patent and produce things with it, your recourses are lawsuits - patents aren't stopping chinese manufacturers from exploiting patents from the US.
And for something this important, I can even imagine governement making some kind of "public good" patent for things that are too influential - where the compensation is pre arranged and reasonable.
Scale up for world consumption will be around $1B capital in my experience, and it will be difficult to get that learning curve paid for if IP doesn’t protect the first mover.
Otherwise there is first mover disadvantage in game theory which dramatically slows progress based on history of tech development.
I'm personally comfortable with making some lucky investors super rich, in this case. Like, this is sort of the canonical good application of a patent: you've invented something extremely useful, but can't keep it a trade secret and don't have the expertise to scale it up yourself. This is what patents are supposed to be for!
People would still make it and just say that they came up with a different way. it is not so easy to prove what someone else is doing behind closed doors.
I see very little value in patents in general, and I certainly don't think they should exist for things like fundamental research.
Patents exist as a hack to make up for the fact that markets don't deal well with situations where investment from one entity benefits everyone. Patents ensure that only the company doing the research gets to benefit from it, robbing the world as a whole from the progress which could have stemmed from that research.
Why can't we leave the markets to do their thing, and have an alternative mode of research whose funding doesn't depend on keeping the fruits of the research out of the hands of humanity? Why can't we leave companies to do whatever research they want, but put a bunch more money into public research institutions and research non-profits and the like?
If you absolutely want to keep research funding private, I can think of other options as well. Instead of making the reward a government-backed monopoly over the use of an innovation, what if the reward was, say, a direct monetary reward through tax reductions, or maybe a system where the government could subsidize products with the innovation for some time period so that competitors have a disadvantage in the market.
I'm sure someone smarter than me could think of other, better solutions. Point is, there are lots of options. Using state power to keep the innovation out of the hands of humanity seems like the worst of them.
Indeed, but I don't see how you're going to special case this if you aren't willing/able to at the same time get a frontal assault from the pharmaceutic giants.
Oh if it was up to me, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be able to keep affordable life saving treatments out of the public's hand through state enforced monopolies either. It's not like I'm all in favour of patents except in the field of superconductors...
I have to admit I'm not very familiar with how patents work in this field in particular, but in general, patents seem to have a huge limiting effect on research. For example, in video coding, nobody wants to invest into making a new codec just to find that their codec falls under a patent owned by the MPEG, and it's really hard to make a new codec which doesn't fall under those patents.
If the patent is on the process for creating LK-99, then obviously that patent only has worth in that people are going to buy LK-99 from the patent holder for development of new applications, and eventually marketing of the applications themselves. The same people may use their initiative to generate a bunch of patents on applications of LK-99, and indeed most of its applications may end up being patented, but that's not to say progress will be halted because of this.
The same investors and executives who bankrolled development since the original synthesis of the material back in 99 without any guarantee of a result?
Which would create future incentives for a lot of people to invest their money into a lot of high risk, high reward science that takes years to do?
Keeping the benefits of possibly the most significant breakthrough in fundamental research this century out of the hands of humanity for 20 years. You find it hard to see that as something negative?
Out of the hands? How so? Do you think they're going to lock it in a safe and not make it commercially available? Or are you under an impression that humanity does not benefit from inventions it pays inventors for?
They could make a product and sell that product. That would keep the innovation in general out of the public's hands, only giving us access to some product built on it.
> I see many comments wondering why the original authors do not reveal their synthesis process. The reason is simple.
Yes, but the reason is a different one: It's that they're busy writing / publishing a journal-grade paper and so they have postponed helping out other labs with reproduction efforts to the time after that. (Source: Hyun-Tak Kim said this in some interview.)
Why is it necessary for other labs to produce the material themselves to verify the claims? The original authors claim they produced some superconductive material, can't they simply offer their samples to other labs to verify?
>Why is it _necessary_ for other labs to produce the material themselves to _verify_ the claims?
I highlighted "necessary" and "verify" because your wording of your question somewhat hides the motivations of the labs.
Multiple labs around the world are not just doing a "homework assignment" to academically verify someone else's work. Instead, the tantalizing idea of a "room-temperature superconductor" would be a miracle material and That Scientific Leap In Progress is why independent labs are racing to reproduce it.
Same excitement of so-called "replication" would happen if somebody put out a plausible "cold fusion" paper or a workable synthesis of a new "drug molecule" to cure cancer. Multiple labs around the world would be motivated to implement their own cold fusion machine and cancer drug. It isn't "necessary" that they replicate it. Instead, they're genuinely excited about making their own miracle devices/drugs and possibly extending the scientific discoveries beyond the original authors' findings.
To my knowledge the original authors promised they would send out samples in the future but want to wait till they have a finalized paper approved for publication. Whether that's reasonable or not is very hard to tell.
IF they are correct and they have an RT superconductor, then it's a highly political decision on who gets sent some samples. Like, all their former colleagues and collaborators will be pissed if they don't get any. But you also would want to send some samples to someone who you know has 1) all the necessary equipment to confirm your claim, 2) has the necessary publication history to make him/her a trustworthy expert on high temperature superconductivity that others would believe, 3) would not want to slow down your progress just so he/she can gain an advantage.
And with something with such huge potential for applications as RT superconductivity, you then also get vested national interests where your national physics society or research ministry might be pissed off if you don't involve enough researchers from the country which funded your research.
Honestly, if I was in their shoes I'd be delaying me sending out my samples into the world as well.
Of course this all hinges on whether they actually have a room-temperature superconductor or not. If they don't actually have one then the delay tactic could also just be in hopes for this all to blow over without them having to prove their findings.
This is of a magnitude that finding the funding to get one of the original researchers to be custodian of a sample while they tour to some well respect other lab whose researchers then do the verification is well within the realm of the possible. That way you can have verification without losing control over where the samples end up, you could take it back when they're done with it.
Well, in the case of LK-99 the production method itself seems to be part of the puzzle, and the original authors aren't noticeably better at it than anyone else. Even their best sample doesn't fully levitate.
We need higher quality samples in order to determine whether the thing actually superconducts, because it's really hard to measure the resistance of small grains of material buried inside a mostly useless rock.
What do you think is easier, making a possible superconductor, or popping it on top of a magnet and seeing if it floats? The latter is an "experiment" only in the sense of an elementary school science class.
Why are we so obsessed with finding out whether the original authors did their homework? Science is not about crediting or discrediting people, it's about collaborating and standing on one another's shoulders to find out truths about the world. If LK-99 turns out to be a superconductor, it doesn't matter if the original paper was glaringly incomplete. If LK-99 doesn't pan out, it matters even less.
That would prove that they'd done it, but not that anyone knew how (including the original authors). If this is going to be useful, we need to know how to make it.
If they can prove this one sample is a room temperature semiconductor that would surely be relevant in deciding how much time to spend on trying to create more of the same material.
It's technically not necessary, but it's also not necessary that the authors give away their samples while they're still running tests (apparently they never even wanted to go public at this stage). The claims will be checked against very high standards, and we will know eventually. But we'll need a bit of patience, the authors haven't even submitted a paper to peer review yet. Science doesn't generally doesn't progress at the instant-gratification speed of social media.
Rarely do researchers get an opportunity to get 15 minutes of fame like right now. Anyone successfully recreating LK99 can
* Potentially do it better/purer
* Get a few news articles, and a mention in a very high traffic Wikipedia page
* Again if they do it well, get 8 figures in funding pretty easily. While during any other day they might be fighting for $50,000 here and $100,000 there
Partly to ensure that the whole process is well understood, and that there aren't some (unstated) aspects specific to the original lab. By way of example, when multiple labs conduct genetics experiments on mice, even the food that the mice were fed has to be standardised to ensure that it isn't driving variation between the results.
Not sure that's "weird" because I have certainly seen pets who were more comfortable around women than men. Maybe from bad experiences in the past before the pet was adopted.
If this material is real. And the mechanism producing it and materials like it could be understood starting process now would give head start on discovering materials that are like it.
It is pretty big pot to get part of if you discover way to refine the process, or find adjacent material with similar or better characteristics.
Perhaps I have a cynical take, but I would guess that the labs are primarily verifying the claims to themselves to identify ways to make profitable research or production lines. They want to fund their own labs.
Publishing verified claims to help others would be secondary.
That’s a cynical tale, but once you realize that profit is a useful way to signal to technologists what the world finds useful in aggregate, it means there is more likelihood that the science gets out of the lab to the real world.
tldr; for good or bad, humanity hasn’t found an incentive mechanism better than capitalism for deploying tech at scale.
Isn't this one of those game theory scenarios? Some labs could profit by not announcing replication, but others could by announcing it as quickly as possible? Thus not all labs will behave the same way, unless they are all colluding which seems unlikely.
It's not necessary and they could simply offer it to other labs. The reason they have not done so (except to one small lab in South Korea that doesn't appear to specialize in superconductivity and claims they need six months to verify) is pretty obvious by now: they don't actually have a superconductor.
I get that the manufacturing process doesn't produce pure samples, and that it's highly likely that the sample has many "islands" of the right lattice structure within it, of various sizes and shapes.
What I don't get is why they don't just pulverize the sample, put it in a magnetic field, and then sift out the floaty particles.
Things floating at an angle and halfway make me very suspicious.
Also, why are all these videos like 5 seconds long? The stuff is supposedly superconducting at room temperature and would supposedly float indefinitely. Why not just put up a 24/7 livestream, do stuff like pass strings/paper/loops/etc around it.
I think this material is very interesting, but all the videos I see are so clownish that I am getting more skeptical as time goes on.
People seem skeptical that it's actually been ruled out by that test. Regardless, that paper found diamagnetism on the level of pyrolytic graphite, which would be interesting in this material albeit not really evidence of superconductivity, but from what I've heard it is very easy to get anomalous reports of diamagnetism during zero field cooling if there is a high-temperature ferromagnetic transition, and you have to be extremely careful about your measurements and do lots of repeated tests to be sure. AFAIK, every other paper has either only seen very weak diamagnetism (expected given the compounds involved) or none at all.
It’s not proof of anything, but it’s suggestive. The only other known materials that show that degree of diamagnetism are superconductors. That magnet is tiny!
TL;DR: Normal magnets have two poles, and will try to flip themselves around to achieve a lower energy state. You cannot levitate a normal magnet on another magnet without mechanical stabilization. Superconducting materials actively repel all magnetic field lines and can achieve levitation without external stabilization.
> “You cannot levitate a normal magnet on another magnet without mechanical stabilization”
The mechanical stabilisation is right there in plain sight where one side of the magnet is clearly resting on the other magnet (physically in contact). Anyone who’s played around with magnets that are heavy and too weak to flip themselves around will not be satisfied with this video. It could be explained by two South Poles opposing each other.
> Magnetic levitation can't be done with normal magnets alone
Technically it can be done with an array of magnets with opposing polarities.
Without more details from on this video's source and legitimacy, one could argue that an array of magnets is hiding under the 'single magnet' cover plate.
I am not saying this is a hoax, but as exciting as this seems we just have to wait it out for more replication publications to make that call.
If we doubt the legitimacy of basic claims like a fair setup of magnets, then there are much easier ways to create a fake, like just tie something on top of it.. but why would we doubt the legitimacy of reliable institutions?
Grand parent was saying it's "impossible". I say it is _technically_ possible.
To which I added:
"I am not saying this is a hoax, but as exciting as this seems we just have to wait it out for more replication publications to make that call"
It has been a little over 2 weeks since the first pre-print from Korea University.
The hashing out of a fabrication process with less impurities will be a long process. My point is not that everyone is pulling a con, my point is that we need to wait it out.
Why can't the weakly positive results be explained by an irregular formation of magnetic crystals that stabilizes the forces, in a way a single magnetic object cannot? As in, not a superconductor, just a novel configuration of magnetic particles?
Absolute layman here, but from what I've read it's supposed to show diamagnetism and the Meissner effect and flux pinning. Assuming no new weird physics, the only materials that exhibit those behaviours are superconductors.
Suppose they have a room temp superconductor(even if it’s not pure). What’s stopping them from revealing the process? It seems like the way they describe it is extremely hard to reproduce. So, are they trying to figure out how to make the most money off it? What else could it be?
The steps are public. Famously the catgirl-boyfriend in Russia ignored them and came up with alternative steps to reproduce on their kitchen counter. However, it's very hard to get right and the original authors also needed many attempts and still had impurities.
They don't necessarily need to know what makes it work, they may do it ten times following the same recipe and it works only one of those times. The first method used to get a new material is usually not the best one, some iteration is needed.
The optimistic aspects are:
1. The diamagnetism of LK-99 is very strong;
2. In almost all experiments, LK-99 has only exhibited one-dimensional diamagnetism, which is hard to consider as fraudulent coincidence;
3. One-dimensional diamagnetism is very mysterious, and there is currently no suitable theoretical explanation.
It has been noted that graphite also exhibits "one-dimensional diamagnetism" (in the sense that it has much stronger diamagnetism in one plane than the other two) and it levitates fine and isn't very mysterious. There also haven't been any reliable measurements of strong diamagnetism in LK-99. We have the video from the team, which is not evidence of diamagnetism let alone strong diamagnetism, and we have a handful of magnetic susceptibility tests from labs on tiny, tiny samples (much smaller than the one in the video) that found weak diamagnetism.
I don't really think anything about LK-99 is optimistic at this point, honestly.
Wouldn’t two-dimensional (planar) superconductivity lead to one-dimensional (linear) diamagnetism? If the eddy currents are stuck in a plane then the induced magnetic field should be perpendicular to that plane, no?
I don't think there is any experimental evidence for that, and the original 1996 theory paper looks sketchy from what I managed to understand (it talkes about van der Waals transition and it is unclear for me where zero resistance would come from in that case)
I keep expecting to see coverage of this in what some would term the "mainstream" press but it's crickets. I refuse to believe that they're waiting for more results either, even the more reputable publications will carry junk science. At the very least there's an interesting story to tell in the publishing of the paper.
Yes, it's been everywhere. But -- rightly -- not as hyped as on the overexcitable corners of the internet who want to follow every little bit of news on the subject (because, I guess, they don't care about the quality of the information? Personally I would rather wait and see what happens when experts have time to apply expertise and rigor to the topic.)
It’s interesting to notice all unofficial institutions (bottom table) have a higher outcome of partial success. Unless the more legitimate labs are less capable, you have to wonder whether anything outside of an accredited institution can be trusted at all at this point. My guess is the allure of hype (more followers / engagement) is too strong for personal gain.
One interesting theory here is contamination. "Legitimate" labs have a higher standard of cleanness and material purity, more stable equipment etc.
If the results are to be believed the crystaline structure is hard to achieve as replacing the right parts with Cu seems borderline random.
less perfect synthesis materials (some of the unofficial institutions have even admitted to using subsitutes for some of the synthesis) so perhaps worse ovens that cannot sustain perfect temps, or substitute materials in some way help the right crystals to show up.
The original Korean lab said they only had a 10% success rate and admit the ppublished synthesis is incomplete because it is waiting full journal approval for the paper to come out.
So we should wait until we have better data, better replication and tbh a working theory of how it even works because it shows odd magnetic behaviour, whether its superconducting or not
Or the simpler explanation: "legit" labs are more cautious about confirming successful synthesis and any test results, to protect the reputation of the lab and parent institution.
I'm not a chemist so this may be a dumb question, but is it possible that polymorphs are coming into play here, and the less official labs are better at contaminating the sample with the correct polymorph?
> and admit the ppublished synthesis is incomplete because it is waiting full journal approval for the paper to come out.
Why would they have to wait for the paper to come out? Couldn't they just publish the steps in a blog post or something before the journal has approved the paper?
Because they don't want to be scooped, essentially. They want the first accepted, peer reviewed, published paper in a high profile journal about RTAPS to be their paper. I have a lot of issues with literal currency being involved in academia, industry domination and patenting and the like, but the real currency of academia is reputation. I'm not going to begrudge them that.
Unofficial institutions may have a lower institutional barrier for just dumping an "It works!" message on social networks.
Big institutions have a reputation to protect, which in this case means being extra careful before making any revolutionary claims.
I don't really think that either is bad, but I would expect confirmations from the stratosphere to come in quite a bit later. Also, it is vacation time in the Northern Hemisphere, so many bigger institutions will be staffed by minimal crews only - mostly by younger people, who don't have kids yet, but don't have much decision authority either.
In the Dept. of Algebra where I studied, it was uncommon to meet a professor in summer, much less several of them at the same time. The postdocs were present, but not the big wigs.
If you are at a national lab and replicate this you would have to do so with a very high level of detail and diligence before disclosing to the press. I am pretty sure that every PI of every lab will be demanding that all process and material is submitted to them and then going over it with a fine tooth comb before putting their name to it.
The private folks have much less to lose, as well as (possibly) more to gain.
At least two entries from the "Private" table (HUST and SSMRL-SEU) have already moved to the "Official/Institutional" table after the connection between the private individual and their institutional affiliation was made.
Indeed, it's quite intriguing to observe the apparent trend of unofficial institutions showing a higher rate of partial success. It raises questions about the factors influencing these outcomes. While it's important not to jump to conclusions about the legitimacy or capability of accredited labs versus unofficial ones, your skepticism is understandable.
Accredited institutions often have established protocols, rigorous peer review processes, and accountability mechanisms that contribute to their credibility. However, it's worth considering that unofficial institutions might have some advantages too, such as more freedom to explore unconventional approaches and potentially quicker adaptation to emerging trends.
Possibly also a base-rate effect going on. There are presumably far more unaccredited groups having a go than official institutions, so even with a worse chance of success they could be over-represented.
OT but I'm always fascinated by forums like this with seemingly a lot of activity but zero information anywhere what it's about. It's like a private club. I often need to resort to the meta tags in order to get an idea:
<meta name="description" content="A popular forum celebrating geek culture and creativity. Home to all genres of original and fan fiction, plus lively discussions about everything nerdy." />
How hard would it be to get false positive results here?
In other words, if I put a lump of random stuff without any real interesting properties and a very motivated and sleep deprived scientist in a lab with all possible test equipment, what would be a probability of getting some kind of test result that would look yellow or green in that table?
In the morning I just check the odds on various betting markets now rather than going to look for actual replication news. If they haven't moved, there's no new news, I reckon, and it saves me having to look in any more detail
Although I was really excited at first as I kept diving deeper in the topic I grew a healthy dose of skepticism for the LK-99 superconductivity claim. The below article[1] has an interesting take on the matter.
> The consensus among physicist is that’s it’s likely to be a dud
That's really not true. It's unclear whether it's a superconductor, but the consensus worst-case outcome is that something very unexpected is happening, which is in itself worth learning more about.
The comments here are of a higher quality (due to top tier moderation) and generally the community is smarter and more in tune. I'd go with the HN consensus any day, over some random subreddit.
HN is a tech forum, plenty of smart people in there, but also plenty of people who think they know more than they really do. Lots of arrogance in here. I am guilty of it myself, and some of my posts got a lot of upvotes even though it was way out of my field of expertise. I try to get things right, fact checking and all that, but my opinion is certainly not worth that of an expert.
All that to say that on tech matters, I think HN is pretty good, because that's where the tech guys go. But for physics, I'd go for r/physics.
Sources for this as the consensus take? Or is this your personal take? As far as I have heard, it is still well under discussion, especially with more recently (per this weekend) levitating flakes, and the fact that noone has successfully replicated a certain-failure of actual conducting properties.
Two reports have increased my patience factor a lot on this
First, a theoretical study found that the phase that’s reported to be superconducting is likely to be metastable based on some density functional theory calculations. That implies that actually making it may be rather difficult, and raises the bar for reproductions to show exactly what they are finding is superconducting or not. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
The second study was a comparison of the properties of superconducting Pb thin films with some of the data people have been reporting on LK-99 repro attempts. The authors hypothesize that people are getting micron to several nanometer sized particles of the superconducting phase embedded in an amporphous non-superconducting phase, and that this explains the mixed results. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01723
So, more careful analysis is needed and I’m still optimistic. I want to see much better x-ray and microscopic characterization along with the resistance data and so on, especially because the property measurements can be tricky. (My background is materials science but not superconductivity or condensed matter physics if that matters)
My takeaway is that nobody, not even the original authors, knows a good, easily replicable way to make LK-99.
A clear no would be multiple sources synthesizing a material that is clearly the same as LK-99 (e.g. by showing most or all of the behavior shown in the videos or described in one of the papers), and then showing experimentally that it isn't actually a superconductor but that some other effect is at play.
Which is why one simple way to clear up a lot of the ambiguity would be to make the "working" sample available for a few other trusted 3rd parties to run some quick tests on.
That isn't simple. The sample needs to be shipped. You have to ensure it doesn't get damaged in shipment. If some lab has a an unknown evil intent they can destory the sample and claim it was shipping damage.
They say they are willing to let other labs examine their sample. If nothing has happened in two months i'll get worried, but for now I don't expect any lab to have seen it
The authors might damage it in transit, either accidentally or for nefarious purpose. No one knows enough to confidently say "this method of handling won't affect future measurements" because no one knows for certain what is going on here.
The only thing we need is solid evidence that it's superconducting. If anyone has a stone that's superconducting at room temperature, then we know it's out there, it's possible to make it. It doesn't matter so much how it was made. If it exists, that's a great step in itself, isn't it?
Yes, but keep in mind that showing superconductivity on very small samples is hard. You never actually measure 0 resistance - you measure a resistance at the limit of your equipment sensitivity.
The smaller the sample, the smaller the resistance is even if it's not superconducting, and all sorts of other effects come into play - i.e. your wires and leads have a resistance you need to account for, parasitic inductance and capacitance climbs etc.
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, but couldn't one measure the extraordinarily large magnetic field that should appear when applying a voltage to (even a tiny sample of) such a material?
A magnetic field is the result of moving an electric charge (in this case electrons). Applying the voltage will move the electrons. The only thing the material being a superconductor changes is that the electrons will lose less energy to resistance while traversing the sample.
True, but what I meant was that the labs that couldn't replicate even diamagnetism clearly haven't created the same material, as the original LK-99 was shown to be diamagnetic.
If someone can show that it is diamagnetic and not superconducting then that could be evidence that they recreated the same material, but that it doesn't show superconductivity.
That makes sense, thanks. So if the replication is not diamagnetic, it means that it's not LK-99, rather than that LK-99 is not diamagnetic itself, thanks.
And even if it turns out it isn't a superconductor, that's pretty cool in its own right, no? At least this layman would think so.
And it would go a way in explaining why so many take the claims seriously and try to replicate it, if we know there's something exciting going on either way.
I understand that denigrating a competitor is a defense mechanism to remove your unease, but really I would not bet against the Chinese.
They improved so much in the last three decades, taking advantage of western smugness, that the only question remaining is whether they will overtake USA or not.
Chinese engineer working in China here. You totally missed the point.
> bet against the Chinese
criticize the lack of innovation is not betting against anyone. it is obvious that China is not leading in anything that can potentially lead to the next industrial revolution.
as explained, no one is betting against China, but would you bet on China to be the next No.1 tech superpower? personally, I won't, my day to day life here tells me that it lacks literally all key ingredients required for such success.
not saying it is not doing okish, but doing ok including becoming the world's largest economy and tech investor is not that fancy when it is purely backed by a huge population size. On a per capita basis, R&D spending is extremely low, I couldn't name any single high tech company here that has a deep & healthy engineering culture.
> taking advantage of western smugness
the west has all the reasons to be "smugness", just look at the recent developments, reusable rockets, private trips to the space, the satellite internet constellation, ChatGPT, mRNA vaccine, the 100% remission rate for a certain type of colon cancer...the list goes really really long and I am just talking about progresses made in the last 3 years.
tell me what Chinese counterparts are? some cheap EV cars made with highly toxic materials? or maybe some mobile apps that popup ten ads for making each online order? or maybe you are talking about the so called online payment system that literally locked an entire generation of senior citizens out of real social life?
> They improved so much in the last three decades
I live & work in Shanghai, a typical match box sized apartment inside the outer ring road now costs 1 million USD when the average wage is $10k USD per annual. Simple maths tells me that one need to be keep working since the end of WWI non stop to buy such an apartment - assuming you don't need to pay tax and you don't eat, drink, buy cloth.
If you work harder to get yourself a fancy Chinese EV there, you can drive your "symbol of personal success" to a countryside, in just 2 hours, you can get to a fancy province called Anhui where you will be welcomed by millions of locals making $1k USD per annual. Don't get too shocked when you realize that those on $1k USD per annual is actually the lucky one, the pension rate is about $25 USD per month.
You need to be totally blind to call all these "improved so much".
It should be a self reevaluating moment rather than a "china bad" moment.
China went from agricultural an third world country to a main contributor in many domains and the manufacturer of all our tech gadgets, in the same time the west pretty much stagnated
> China went from agricultural an third world country to a main contributor in many domains and the manufacturer of all our tech gadgets, in the same time the west pretty much stagnated
check my reply above and then go and tell your "main contributor" story to those hundreds of millions Chinese pensioners on $25 USD per month.
below is the source of the mentioned $25 USD per month pension rate. It is from China's National People's Congress web site, I guess it can't be fake news, right?
No matter how you paint it, China is a backward & dirty poor developing 3rd world country with a huge economic, scientific & military capability gap with the west.
> to those hundreds of millions Chinese pensioners on $25 USD per month
There are almost 40m americans living under poverty, which is just about the same as china in term of percentage. The 25 usd a month figure seems to be for a social benefit system you don't even have equivalent for in the US
> China is a backward & dirty poor developing 3rd world country with a huge economic, scientific & military capability gap with the west.
Literally no one puts China in the third world country category. Nobody said there isn't a gap
> I guess it can't be fake news, right?
This isn't 4chan you can put that back in your clown bag
HN is such a weird place. Every so often it adopts these communities of people obsessed with something, and lately it's whatever LK-99 is. I wish they'd just go make a subreddit.
I find it much more odd that whenever noteworthy scientific or technical news are heavily discussed on this news platform that is pretty much for such content, some users are very quick to be needlessly dismissive of everybody's interest, citing the currently higher frequency of threads/links concerning said newsworthy topic.
Quite ironically though, individually policing & complaining about the relevance of specific subtopics indeed feels quite "Reddit", while one of the things that make HN so pleasant is exactly that it's user base usually abstains from arguing about such meta & leave moderating actual offtopic to the moderators.
Well there are some people whose personality is their snarky cynicism and negativity. If other people weren't getting excited about stuff, they wouldn't have anything to reject and belittle! Then we wouldn't all get to know how smart they are. How unfortunate that would be.
And some people's personality is to be an armchair expert speculating for speculation's sake. I guess it makes them feel smart, and they like to hear themselves talk
At this point it's better to flag LK-99 posts like this on HN and move on.
To much noise and no signal. There's no point going down a rabbit hole on unconfirmed and low quality replication attempts. You'll hear about it elsewhere if it's actually replicated.
The most strongly diamagnetic materials that aren't a superconductor are bismuth and pyrolytic carbon, a graphite-like material.
Bismuth has a density of about 10g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength (X) of -16.6 x 10^-5. It won't levitate above a magnet because it's just too heavy.
Pyrolytic carbon has a density of 2g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength of -40 x 10^-5. Thin sheets of this lightweight material will levitate over strong magnets, provided the magnetic field alternates in a chessboard pattern.
LK-99 must be similar in density to bismuth, and the videos (like below) show large chunks of it levitating. If it's not a superconductor, it's the most diamagnetic room temperature material ever seen, by orders of magnitude.
And on top of that, if pure diamagnetism were at work, the samples would have to slide off the magnet. They wouldn't stay there and float. It's similarly unclear why the material seems to always float at an angle. It seems to track the field lines in some way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/science/lk-99-superconduc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism#Materials Diamagnetic strength = susceptibility
My background: physics, but not superconductors.