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Science

'The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor' (arxiv.org) 183

Posted by msmash from the potential-breakthrough dept.
A team of Korean scientists claims to have created a room-temperature superconductor that also works at standard, ambient pressure. The work, however, is yet to be peer-reviewed. You can read their paper on Arxiv. Its abstract: For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (TC), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (IC), Critical magnetic field (HC), and the Meissner effect. The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress. It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface. The heat capacity results indicated that the new model is suitable for explaining the superconductivity of LK-99. The unique structure of LK-99 that allows the minute distorted structure to be maintained in the interfaces is the most important factor that LK-99 maintains and exhibits superconductivity at room temperatures and ambient pressure.
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'The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor' More

'The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor'

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  • Interesting really. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @01:46PM (#63716396) Homepage
    Other claims, debunked or not, required external high pressures to reach superconductivity. Just from the summary it appears that if you can manufacture a structure that is inherently filled with internal stresses that create internal pressures then it might actually work without external cooling or pressure inducing mechanisms.

    Just maybe. This time.

    • Explanation may not be Valid (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:15PM (#63716502) Journal
      I'd at least wait until it has passed peer review. Especially because the high-pressure superconductor claims appear to have been largely retracted by the journals and accusations of falsifying data leveled, with Nature retracting another paper [nature.com] yesterday.

      These authors are completely different from that ongoing fiasco so there is no reason to discount their experimental claims - although they still need to pass peer review and then reproducibility - but I would be dubious about theoretical claims that the material creates pressure as a means to produce superconductivity because, after all these forced retractions, I don't think there is any evidence now that pressure induces superconductivity.

      • Re:Explanation may not be Valid (Score:4, Insightful)

        by thrasher thetic ( 4566717 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:29PM (#63716544)
        Peer review is overrated, I'm interested in whether it can be replicated.

      • I'd at least wait until it has passed peer review.

        Hey. If using unverified documents is good enough for Congress, it's good enough for us. :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        High pressure, high temperature superconductors are real and reproducible. The specific retracted claim is a *room temperature*, high pressure super conductor. IIRC the current verified record is -23 degrees Celsius, and that's at the end of a long chain of discoveries of higher and higher temperature materials. A room temperature, high pressure superconductor discovered today or in the next couple years would be just another in a long line of incremental improvements.

        An SATP superconductor like this would

      • There is a long (and widely reproduced) history of pressure and stress modifying superconductivity, but some statements in this paper might be taken to imply that these authors think that conventional BCS superconductivity is caused by internal pressure due to thermal contraction. That seems very wrong to me.

        The other somewhat red flag for me is that they made thin films of this material from a "thermal vapor deposition" technique (evaporation?) with no additional details given. If the superconductivi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        p'shaw

        folks responded the same way to the cold fusion breakthrough!

        [*whispering sounds*]

        oh, never mind.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        Maybe all the fake ones came out early, knowing this real one was coming soon. Last chance to grab some scam money before the real thing.

  • Nobel Prize if True (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @01:47PM (#63716402) Homepage Journal

    The paper is very cool in that they go into their theoretical model of what's going on subatomically, not just reporting a material result.

    I'm hoping they're right and this helps solve many of the world's energy problems.

    Even more interestingly:

    experimental results and discussions on LK-99 will be published immediately in the next paper, including an interesting controllable levitation phenomenon and the coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity

    so perhaps transportation benefits as well.

    Curious that this is out just before the UAP hearings in Congress, given what people have speculated about Ross Coulthart's "too big to move" location being in Korea, but however we got this information the benefits are potentially so massive it's impossible to predict all the implications.

  • Extraordinary Claims (Score:5, Insightful)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:01PM (#63716456) Journal
    to quote Carl Sagan: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". It is good that they are putting this out there. On the other hand, it's just a pre-print. The original data and figures are not provided, nor discussion of their test equipment. Peer-review hasn't happened yet, let alone reproduction by some other group. Hopefully that is forthcoming, but skepticism is very much warranted.

    So, on the one hand: "Holy Shit!" On the other hand: "we'll see."

    • Was the evidence for contintents drifting hiding in plain sight on every map of South America and Africa coastlines, yet geologists found ways of dismissing this data anyway for decades?

      • It took decades because they had to see it with their own eyes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          I think it was more that fresh geologists had to wait for tenured geologists who had certain fixed ideas about the way things were to die off. Also simply observing that it was happening was not enough for them. They needed a proposed mechanism for why it was happening. It doesn't seem reasonable today because there was overwhelming evidence that it had happened, regardless of how, but hindsight is easy.

    • Science is peer reviewed.
      Still, they published completely fake papers on human cloning - by a highly respected Korean scientist [wikipedia.org] using a very special and very Korean method. [wired.com]
      But there is more... [youtube.com]

      • Science is peer reviewed.

        So, if we dumped you on a desert island by yourself, science wouldn’t exist? Nonsense.

        Nowhere in the scientific method does anything resembling “peer review” appear as a step, but peer review is nonetheless a great filter for assessing the quality—or lack thereof—of the scientific work that was done.

        • Science as in Science Magazine.
          As in academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  • Cool demo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:01PM (#63716460)

    Here is a video of sample on top of a fixed magnet:

    https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1684020175215927296 [twitter.com]

    It's not repelled by the magnet, it's not attracted to magnet, it's locked in position, a property of superconducting materials [wikipedia.org].

    The publication may still be pre-print but this is one of those wonderful cases where you can pretty much just use your eyes - it doesn't come down to someone with an advanced degree making sure the math was done right. I guess you could still speculate that it is all an elaborate hoax including the demo but that's also pretty unlikely given the credentials of the people involved and how long they have been working on this.

    Someone pointed out that the submitted two papers one with six authors and one with only three - the maximum for splitting the Nobel prize - so they may be feeling pretty good about this.

    • Longer version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Diamagnetic materials also show similar behavior, i.e. pyrolytic graphite:
      https://youtu.be/VC3r9-OaWes?t... [youtu.be]

      • There's a significant difference .. the magnet configuration.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jythie ( 914043 )
          The particular videos might look different, but the principle is the same. Superconductors are simply highly diamagnetic materials, meaning it is the same effect in other materials only weaker.

          • To levitate pyrolitic graphite you have to place the graphite at 1. the center of four square magnets arranged such that the poles of the squares are alternating (north-south-north-south), or 2. inside a cylinder, or 3. with an overhead magnet. Note: these guys could have done that and hidden it.

    • Re:Cool demo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @03:59PM (#63716812)

      To me, this video looks more like two magnets repelling each other than the Meissner effect. The part where the chip swings around and settles to a lower energy state is nothing like the Meissner effect videos I've seen, which show a superconductor maintaining its distance and orientation to a magnet. The entirety of the video failing to show full levitation looks suspiciously like a small, weakly magnetic chip is having one end repelled upwards by the magnet it rests on. A superconductor wouldn't flip itself around like this chip does.

      • Video would also need to be made at 126.85 C - and while neodymium magnets won't demagnetize [kjmagnetics.com] at that temperature, those human fingers holding the magnet at the start of the video might have some issues.

        So maybe a preheated sample is cooling faster on the thicker, heavier, end which is touching the magnetic surface, losing the superconductivity unevenly?

  • And now we can finally hope (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:03PM (#63716466) Homepage

    to see the year of the Linux desktop!

  • Suspicious Juxtaposition (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spinlock_1977 ( 777598 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {7791_kcolnipS}> on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:24PM (#63716526) Journal

    Preceding this story about a room-temperature, standard pressure superconductors:
    - UFO's and aliens are real and we have wreckage and corpses
    - Artificial intelligence is so real that companies and legislators are nervous

    Did someone drop LSD in the slashdot punchbowl? Or maybe my ham sandwhich?

  • Is the 'room' a woodshed on the south-pole?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Even if that were the case, that would still be amazingly fantastic. -40 or so is so much warmer than existing ambient pressure superconductors.

    • From TFA: "Tc 400 K, 127 C". Unless your room is a furnace, it's a very practical room temperature.

  • unobtainium.

    $20 million per kilo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ken_g6 ( 775014 )

      The proposed material is composed of common elements. It's apatite [wikipedia.org], sub lead for calcium, and dope with copper. So that's lead, copper, phosphorus, oxygen, and hydrogen and/or fluorine and/or chlorine. If it's unobtanium it's only because it's difficult to arrange the atoms; and I don't think that's the case either.

  • They seem to be postulating a new mechanism:

    "Humankind has long learned that the properties of matter stem from its structure. However, so
    far, the correlation between superconductivity and the structural change of material has hardly
    been properly clarified. In fact, the two main factors affecting the generation of superconductivity
    of superconductors discovered so far are temperature and pressure [refs suppressed]. And both temperature
    and pressure affect its volume. It seems that the stress generated by the

    • a material that superconducts does that independently of the reasons the experimenters give for it.

      a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor is civilization changing milestone, the theorists can argue about what it's doing for eternity and that won't change the impact on humankind which would be more immense than most here could imagine.

  • And here's me thinking that a superconductor was Clarke Kent punching tickets on a train. Damn, times have changed!

  • These things come and go. The team is basically saying they can do the impossible, there's a small chance this could happen but it's unlikely. Believe it when you see it.

  • Don't get your hopes up (Score:4, Informative)

    by xfade551 ( 2627499 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:24PM (#63716862)
    In the paper, they only tested this at the milliamp scale. While that could possibly help in something like a CPU, there's still a lot to go to see if this could remain valid for loads larger than a bathroom exhaust fan. Superconductors, even the cryo ones, tend to break superconductivity after the current reaches a certain threshold, and that threshold isn't always strongly related to the crossectional area, so "just make it bigger" doesn't always work, either.

  • At last! (Score:3)

    by Mal-2 ( 675116 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:59PM (#63716920) Homepage Journal

    I can finally achieve my dream of having the ultimate air hockey table! No more mucking about with liquid nitrogen, that was getting a bit expensive, and the pucks kept cracking on hard shots.

    Seriously though, even the "seconds" are probably going to find use for some of their more toy-like attributes, like being able to make air hockey tables out of them.

  • Wait... not cool.
  • If this does work out it will be great news for CAT scanners, PET scanners and similar that I believe use liquid helium to keep the electromagnets cool. Quite a shortage of that stuff. Maybe even for the Large Hadron Collider.

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