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Science

Many Physicists 'Skeptical' of Spectacular Superconductor Claims (science.org) 85

"This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure," writes Science magazine. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea's Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical... "They come off as real amateurs," says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they've presented some of the data is fishy." On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. "People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff." Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, "I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques." Still, she cautions, "The data seems a bit sloppy...."

What are the reasons for skepticism? There are several, Norman says. First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn't a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. And that's an unpromising starting point for making a superconductor. What's more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn't greatly affect the electrical properties of the material, Norman says. "You have a rock, and you should still end up with a rock." On top of that, lead atoms are very heavy, which should suppress the vibrations and make it harder for electrons to pair, Norman explains.

The papers don't provide a solid explanation of the physics at play. But the researchers speculate that within their material, the doping slightly distorts long, naturally occurring chains of lead atoms... [Mason] notes that Lee and Kim also suggest that a kind of undulation of charge might exist in the chains and that similar charge patterns have been seen in high-temperature superconductors. "Maybe this material really just hits the sweet spot of a strongly interacting unconventional superconductor," she says.

The big question will be whether anybody can reproduce the observations...

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.
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Many Physicists 'Skeptical' of Spectacular Superconductor Claims

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  • by vivian ( 156520 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @05:09PM (#63724446)

    Many of the concerns by other researchers that this is fake could instantly be alleviated by the original researchers providing samples for testing by other labs.

    • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday July 29, 2023 @05:23PM (#63724462) Homepage Journal

      > Many of the concerns by other researchers that this is fake could instantly be alleviated by the original researchers providing samples for testing by other labs.

      They say they've provided complete and thorough instructions on how to make it. Decent lab people are saying it's a 2-3 day grow, so assuming setup time we'll have confirmation or refutation in 2-3 weeks.

      They have a patent filed so they're not truly worried about everybody just "stealing" it.

      That's the right way if you believe the patent system can still be held generating the promises of its original intent.

      • by vivian ( 156520 )

        They say they've provided complete and thorough instructions on how to make it

        Providing material for other labs to test is the next logical step that requires minimal effort by other labs, is quick, and would add more weight to their quite extraordinary claims.

        While it is important to provide replicable instructions on how to make it, that still leaves the possibility that others may not follow the instructions or do things in a slightly different way that would result in a slightly different material, and also imposes much higher costs in terms of lab time and setup, even if the mat

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Providing material for other labs to test is the next logical step that requires minimal effort by other labs, is quick, and would add more weight to their quite extraordinary claims.

          It isn't just the material in question, there are other aspects such as what GP brought up, the materials chosen to dope with this ceramic that alter its properties.

          When the copper coated with LK-99 is questioned due to the copper substrate, a sample isn't helpful.
          We all have plain old copper already, and already have shown copper without LK-99 shows the same effects in their video.

          We need to dope other materials with LK-99 to know if the LK-99 is actually changing the properties of those other materials.

          Th

          • It would take them the same amount of time to grow them as it would the rest of us.

            Time to grow a sample will be the same, but there won't be any time needed to build the apparatus or to obtain the material needed.
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Patent has supposedly been filed, so you can expect proper peer review once time needed to replicate it according to instructions is behind us.

  • by mindwhip ( 894744 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @05:12PM (#63724450)

    Their 'findings' and 'proof' videos can be explained by 'normal' magnetic effects https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    In addition their only video they show of the typical levitating lump of material seems to have been supercooled as you can see water vapour condensation/clouds.
    That is all.

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @05:54PM (#63724500)

    Thus far, I only know found one person online that's trying to replicate this experiment live-streaming on Twitch. He's doing all the prep work and is expecting the PbSO4 to arrive on Monday after which it will take about a day to get the result. So he's predicting to have some results by Tuesday or Wednesday, See here on Twitter what he's done so far: https://twitter.com/andrewmcca... [twitter.com] Also Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/andrewmc... [twitch.tv]

    • It seems like most science does not happen via livestream.
      • It seems legit though.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Story of every fake livestream pretending to be real to date. And there have been untold millions of fake livestreams pretending to be doing something real. This includes everything from fake prank streams to twitch thots flashing their sex organs to the camera "totally by accident".

    • Atypical method of livestream, but that's exactly how science is supposed to work.

      Publish your findings and way to reproduce the effect. Other people follow it and attempt to reproduce the effect. If it works, get congratulations on the advancement, your Nobel Prize is in the mail. If it doesn't work or others see mixed results, take the reputation hit, figure it out and publish again.

      The oddity with their patents already being filed is that to be valid, a patent must be enough to replicate it. The proces

      • Patents do not require "others" to replicate it. And depending on country, a patented apparatus, does not even need to work.

        • Subtle strawman there, changing from what I wrote.

          A patent containing enough to replicate it is not the same as actually requiring anybody to replicate it. The first is a requirement held by most nations and WIPO, the second is not.

          Regardless, it is irrelevant to the point. It is exactly the scientific method: either people will validate the results and the breakthrough validated, or it will not be validated by others leaving their reputation broken. Either it works as a superconductor as described or it

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Typically you apply for a provisional patent, which doesn't really require anything specific other than some kind of description of the invention. The actual patent application is as you describe, but it also doesn't hit the internet the day it's filed. If you're going to file it's a good idea to do it before you publish because public disclosure normally locks in a timeline on when you *must* file a patent application.

      • by jonadab ( 583620 )
        > The process must work as described

        Sort of.

        Under US law, the patent has to supply enough information for someone to build the invention. But the invention, once built, does not necessarily have to actually do what it's supposed to do. The USPTO has issued numerous patents for perpetual motion machines. You can build the devices based on the information in the patents; but the devices, once built, are not actually capable of perpetual motion.
  • maybe in this case a lack of "knowledge to preclude unpromising approaches" was exactly what was needed.
  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @09:04PM (#63724726)
    Legitimate leaps in material science come from two sources: Very large projects that can afford to look for big advances by trial and error, or accidents in more limited projects when looking for something completely different and more mundane. Mavericks specifically looking for something big and finding exactly that is almost all fraud; the rest is almost all error; and the rest of what's left after that is almost always far less significant than they think.
  • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @09:31PM (#63724750) Homepage
    Now we don't have to bother the blue aliens on Pandora for their unobtainium.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    >What are the reasons for skepticism? There are several, Norman says. First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn't a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. And that's an unpromising starting point for making a superconductor. What's more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn't greatly affect the electrical properties of the material, Norman says. "You have a rock, and you should still end up with a rock." On top o

  • by Ken_g6 ( 775014 ) on Sunday July 30, 2023 @04:14AM (#63725082)

    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/... [nextbigfuture.com]

    They didn't completely verify superconductivity, but something interesting is happening.

  • The same group has disproven the speed of light! (not really)
  • It strikes me this isn't a very hard bit of science to replicate (or fail to replicate).

    If I had to guess most university chemical engineering labs could cook this up in an afternoon.

    So, if it is easy, then someone should have replicated it by now.

    Or, it is really tricky to get right with insanely high purities, timing, etc. So, maybe people are failing, but reluctant to be the one to stand up and say, "Didn't work for me." not knowing if they failed to get it right, or it is bogus science.

    But e
    • by jonadab ( 583620 )
      Eh, I can forgive people for thinking it's impossible, because superconductors just seem so fantastical, especially if they don't require exotic conditions, and extra-especially if you understand the implications of what could be done with such a substance. It would feel an *awful* lot like magic. Long-distance power transmission lines could use safe voltages and experience no loss over tens of thousands of miles. Missiles and probably fighter jets would become useless in the face of automatic anti-missi
  • Most people on this site aren't old enough to remember the bullshit announcement of cold fusion and are thus being sucked in by the exact same cognitive blindspot.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Many people on this site also aren't old enough to remember the announcement of high temperature superconductivity three years earlier.

    • I am. As far as I recall, the results of the Pons/Fleischman experiment, which although almost certainly not anything that could be described as "cold fusion," were nevertheless quite weird, and have yet to be fully explained. Also AFAIR, the Navy took the experiment quite seriously and went to tremendous efforts to try to understand it.
      • The results weren't weird. They were the result of incompetent experimenters.

        The American military takes lots of bullshit seriously. They've bought dowsing rods.

  • So I guess "Scientific Method Works Exactly As Expected" doesn't exactly bait the clicks.
  • they've heard this song before, sometimes sung by believers, othertimes by charlatans. Until the experiment is replicated, the underlying Physic s understood, I will be skeptical as well.

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