LK-99: Team of Southeast University observed zero resistance below 110 K

https://twitter.com/lipez400/status/1686793608626663441

by thecopy • 3 years ago

640 324 3 years ago

In the video, it says above 110K and not below, I got confused as well. I will add that a lot of people are deleting retweeting this. May be there is something more to it.

WinstonSmith84• 3 years ago

The first comment tells (from the professor talking in that video):

In order not to misunderstand everyone, let me say that it is below 110K, and 0 resistance is observed at normal pressure.

Google translation, but I think it's clear that it's below and not above. At least normal pressure ... that's disappointing but still an improvement

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

I still don't understand what this is saying.

There was 0 resistance below 110 Kelvin (-165celcius)?

But not at room temperature?

thecopy• 3 years ago

In the Resistance-Temperature graph (https://twitter.com/Lipez400/status/1686793608626663441/phot...) the resistance starts increasing from 110K

valine4• 3 years ago

What’s the explanation for the sudden drop between 230K and 250K? It’s not dropping to zero but something is happening there.

threatripper2• 3 years ago

It should say "up to 110K".

SamPatt• 3 years ago

As I understand it, this is strong evidence of this being a novel new superconductor, but not at room temperature.

That's still TBD but hasn't been replicated by anyone reputable yet.

stonemetal12• 3 years ago

In American dollars that is -261.67F, a little chilly for room temp.

azernik2• 3 years ago

But on the warm side for a superconductor, and displaying some weird behavior just below water ice temperatures.

declan_roberts• 3 years ago

One point in favor of a novel superconductor material, one strike against it being a superconductor at room temperature.

zevv• 3 years ago

https://nitter.net/lipez400/status/1686793608626663441

chaimanmeow• 3 years ago

credibility of LK99 claims is very very high. What are the medium term practical implications for all these potential applications?

distortionfield2• 3 years ago

It seems more and more like it's credible, but that synthesis is going to prove to be the issue. All these repro attempts are having too much success for there to be nothing behind the team's claims.

monkeynotes• 3 years ago

Can you explain why -160c is a measure of success when the claim was room temperature? A super conductor functioning at -160c would make MRIs simpler, but it's not world changing.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

Credible? Their claim was “room-temperature superconductivity.”

ianburrell2• 3 years ago

We also don't know its critical field strength. The original measurement from Korea was low. That could improve as they improve synthesis, but could be problem with the material. There are lots of high temperature superconductors that aren't useful; YBCO is important because of high field strength and liquid nitrogen coooling.

I'm sure there are lots of uses for low current room-temperature superconductor. But powerful magnets and long-distance power transmission require large currents and big magnetic fields.

meindnoch• 3 years ago

Start shorting power companies.

1attice• 3 years ago

upvoted for the latent pun

NickM• 3 years ago

Hypothetically, if we did end up with a worldwide superconducting energy grid, this would smooth load, which I would expect would make generation cheaper (since we can get rid of the need for expensive peaker plants and/or stationary storage requirements to handle local demand spikes). This would therefore make power companies more profitable, no?

kaibee• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Night_Thastus• 3 years ago

What do you mean? If it's only a superconductor below 110K, that's not nearly as significant.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

Yes, that's what one team now says: that they have observed super conductivity and that this happens at a much lower temperature than the one claimed by the other team. But it is at ambient pressure and more importantly there are already multiple confirmations of the Meissner effect at room temperature. Besides that this experiment shows some really weird stuff happening at higher temperatures that needs to be explained.

So this race is far from run yet.

BasedAnon5• 3 years ago

increased geopolitical tension

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

That is an interesting observation and puts words to some thoughts that I've had: if it turns out that this is 'the real thing' and the patent holds up South Korea is suddenly a superpower.

ReptileMan• 3 years ago

0 applications out of the door but huge leap for material science. And some of the best and brightest people will look for something deep there.

zootreeves• 3 years ago

Why would other teams be observing floating at room temp? Is it possible to have a diamagnet that becomes a superconductor?

baq4• 3 years ago

It’s possible there are tiny bits of superconducting stuff at room temperature which connect into bigger and bigger bits as temperature drops, until it starts working as a whole at 110K.

Maybe. Don’t quote me.

dinosaurdynasty• 3 years ago

That would suggest that a very high quality sample would superconduct at room temperature.

progrus• 3 years ago

Due to how these materials behave, this likely means you can manufacture a real-deal UFO in orbit…

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

what? give me an effective field theory for that lol because that is not a thing

adad95• 3 years ago

I want to believe.

wilsynet• 3 years ago

The truth is out there.

selimthegrim2• 3 years ago

There’s a reason USO is a pun in Japanese.

scarmig3• 3 years ago

Interesting. Some people are getting strong diamagnetism at RTP, and now someone is actually seeing zero resistance at a low temperature.

I'd take this as mildly positive news. It would be a surprising material if it were a high Tc (only in the LN2 sense) superconductor that is also strongly diamagnetic at room temperature (though I'm not sure if that's more surprising than a RTP superconductor).

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

It's confusing. You'd expect both to be present or none, it is strange to have a material that is conducting and diamagnetic at room temperature and that shows super conductivity at much lower temperature. You'd expect the diamagnetism to disappear with the superconductivity.

marshray• 3 years ago

Multiple teams have said they had to produce 10 batches just to get one sample with properties worth reporting on.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that different teams are all ending up with different variations of a common material, with different impurities, crystal structure, etc.

There's likely a whole zoo of interesting materials here!

borkt3• 3 years ago

Observed effects which have been given a name != a single universal truth. Just because we have experimental evidence of effects and theoretical explanations for their occurrence prove we actually have defined the underlying phenomenon's which produce the observed effect accurately. The reason we experiment isn't to prove our theories are correct so much as it is to probe where they break down so we can further refine our understanding of the universe. What we are likely seeing here is the result of an organized pattern of atomic nucleii forming a lattice which creates the conditions for the movement of electrons to be easier (or harder) than expected at certain temperatures (with temperature being the property which induces strain on the lattice). This is very crude, but begins to explain the multitude of factors at play here.

threatripper2• 3 years ago

If only part of the sample is superconducting and the other parts are ordinary conductors or isolators, the superconducting islands could show diamagnetism while being isolated from each other which means that eletrical current needs to pass resistive areas and therefore experiences resistance.

valianteffort2• 3 years ago

Could it not also mean an impure sample? Everyone is in a rush right now but none of these research teams are exactly experts of manufacture.

gchadwick• 3 years ago

Certainly no expert here but if you take the original video and replications at face value it does exhibit strong diamagnetism at room temperature. Superconductors are diamagnetic due to the Meissner effect at their superconducting temperature. This would mean LK99 is a superconductor at low temperature and separately be strongly diamagnetic at room temperature (no Meissner effect if it's not super conducting). Would that be unusual?

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

It's all unusual because it is uncharted territory. My guess would be assuming that it all pans out that this is due to various impurities and that it will take a while before we have a sample that is pure enough that all of these properties can be nailed down for good.

What's strange is that drop at higher temps, that's either a measurement anomaly or something really odd.

adolph2• 3 years ago

due to various impurities and that it will take a while before we have a sample that is pure enough that all of these properties can be nailed down for good.

Do you think it will be "purity" or understanding material variance/specific impurity?

It reminds me of Fogbank, the nuke material claimed to be "so secret they forgot how to make it." Part of the story of manufacturing difficulty was due to increased purity of modern materials/processes.

In a bizarre twist, the new production facility and reverse-engineered production process yielded a version of Fogbank that was of a higher purity than it had been in the past, according to the article. The problem, however, was that for Fogbank to work as intended in existing warhead designs, that previous level of impurity was actually essential. NNSA had to revise the process to ensure the final product was just as impure.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32867/fogbank-is-myste...

lambdasquirrel• 3 years ago

According to wikipedia, that was observed by the original team in Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts

Claimed to have synthesized LK-99 and to have measured superconductivity up to a temperature of 110 kelvin. Claimed to have observed an abrupt drop in resistance between ~300K and 220K, aligning with the Korean LKK team's results. Claimed to have confirmed structural consistency with x-ray diffraction.

scarmig3• 3 years ago

Bismuth is a strong diamagnet, and it can enter a superconducting state (at a fraction of a degree above zero), so it's not impossible. (And lots of materials are weak diamagnets and superconduct at some point.) So it wouldn't be unheard of. That said, LK-99 would definitely be an object of lots of research if it does have those properties.

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

I have seen it posted that diamagnetic materials require multiple magnets stuck together to create field "pockets" (?) for the material to rest in.

The few videos of lk99 show it reacting to a singular magnet. A property of superconductors that apparently diamagnetic materials don't have.

DistractionRect• 3 years ago

That's for levitating a diamagnetic material.

It'll react fine to a singular magnet, it just won't be stable enough to levitate - that's why the videos show casing replication of diamagnetism show it standing on end.

uyhgr3• 3 years ago

The term is “flux pinning”, and it only applies to the “quantum lock” effect. That is the specifically static hovering effect.

The diamagnetism, importantly this means repulsion of both poles simultaneously and equally (this is how you can have these magnets spin, a regular magnet repels same poles and attracts opposites, diamagnets repel both poles), is simply a characteristic of the superconductor, but it alone would just repel the object off.

Here is a timestamped link to NileRed’s YBCO video that visually describes the flux pinning:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7gyZJg5nc&t=1887

And here’s a timestamped link to Ben Krasnow’s Applied Science YBCO video where he shows a close up of the crystal’s cross section that shows the imperfections that allow the magnetic field through for the pinning effect:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU&t=75

depereo• 3 years ago

I would say any results that are already out are from people speedrunning production; give it another six or so days and there will be a ton of labs that have managed to produce various, better samples and will have performed decent experimentation on these.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 3 years ago

The premise is flawed because that assumes the samples they are studying are identical.

Replication is difficult, and particularly difficult for novel processes where the important variables are not well understood. It could be that the methods were reported as accurately as possible but still leave out critical detail(s).

zamalek• 3 years ago

The strength of the diamagnetism would be extremely anomalous if it were not a superconductor, and would need new physics/names - super-diamagnetism or something (which itself would still be very useful). The chances of it being new physical phenomena is vanishingly small - we're almost definitely seeing superconductivity at STP with this degree of diamagnetism.

tigershark4• 3 years ago

Exactly. And from the various videos it doesn’t seem diamagnetic at all because it floats in a stationary way on a single planar magnet. Diamagnetic material can’t do that, they need an array of magnets.

fgeahfeaha• 3 years ago

That's a failed repro then right?

Below 110K is below -163.15 Celcius

How would that compare to other superconductors?

p1mrx• 3 years ago

Tc = 110 K would take the #4 spot on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superconductors

wthomp• 3 years ago

#3 spot at atmospheric pressure

rbinv• 3 years ago

At atmospheric pressure, no less.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

HgTlBaCaCuO

New band name. And band gap.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

It is and it isn't. It's at ambient pressure (which is something useful), and there is something very odd happening much higher up that needs to be explained. They say their sample purity is higher than the one the Korean team had, so that would normally lead to better yield and easier confirmation of the superconductivity. But since it does show the Meissner effect in other samples as well at room temperature there is a lot that still needs explaining before we can say it is a failed reproduction.

BasedAnon5• 3 years ago

perhaps an impurity caused the effect they're looking for

bloopernova• 3 years ago

I adore stories that include the phrase "that's odd" or "something odd happens when ..."

Even if we don't get the astonishing result originally claimed by the rogue paper, it's still a triumph of science in my ignorant opinion.

BasedAnon5• 3 years ago

technically a failure, but still a strange result

piyh• 3 years ago

I don't think it's a failure if the original claims are showing some kind of promise, science is being done, and the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed forward.

In other words, not "Eureka!" but "that's weird".

HybridCurve• 3 years ago

One of the most well known, YBCO, has a Tc of 95K.

seewhydee• 3 years ago

Yeah it looks to me like either a replication failure or even evidence AGAINST a superconducting phase. A superconductor's resistance curve is supposed to show a sharp drop to zero at the transition temperature. If it's a dirty inhomogenous sample (e.g. specks of superconductor embedded in non-superconducting material), you get a kink where the curve descends to a non-zero background resistance. In the Southeast University data, there's a smooth curve that goes down until they get to the noise floor. There's no transition.

notorandit• 3 years ago

below 110 K

It is not room temperature, is it?

MayeulC• 3 years ago

Room temp is 300K. Liquid nitrogen boils at 77K, though.

brookst2• 3 years ago

Not Canadian, eh?

motoboi• 3 years ago

I suppose it is, if the room is in Mars.

nmeagent• 3 years ago

0 C is 273.15K, so room temperature is around 295 K. 300 K is a decent approximation to make back-of-the-envelope calculations easier, but I don't know anybody that actually keeps their room at 80 F.

creatorpiece123• 3 years ago

Read the graph, there is a sharp drop in resistance from 220K-250K. Its still not superconducting but it could be hinting something?

valine4• 3 years ago

That’s what I was thinking. In the video he brushes it off as a potential equipment malfunction, but perhaps it’s the effect everyone is looking for.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

I'm really curious what the eventual explanation of this is and whether other teams will observe this happening as well.

pokey00• 3 years ago

A sudden discontinuity like that but continuing the same curve and jumping back... that's equipment malfunction 99% of the time.

azernik2• 3 years ago

Could indicate some superconducting regions in the whole sample, or some weird anisotropic superconduction at higher temps...

That sharp drop, if not equipment error, could be a lot of things.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

Fascinating and ultimately confusing result. What is happening in that higher temperature window where the resistance suddenly drops orders of magnitude?

omgJustTest• 3 years ago

This appears to be a great result.

"Room temperature" super conductor result? No.

But this is basically showing there is some superconductivity in the sample, and cooler temperatures expose intrinsic band structures.

Pretty exciting!

hcks• 3 years ago

How is it exciting? It invalidates the original claim. We already have better SC.

matsemann• 3 years ago

It doesn't invalidate the original claim, as they haven't been able to make a pure sample to test with, as I understand it. Or at least that there is some difference between their samples and the others, but still it shows promise.

numpad0• 3 years ago

That supplemental video files and drama around submission process seemed to exhibit telltales signs of forged science, so the fact that this seems not nothing and is getting material scientists excited is exciting.

obituary_latte• 3 years ago

There are multiple mentions of "extraterrestrial super islands", is this a mistranslation of the Meissner effect? Great term nonetheless.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

Yes, I saw that, there are some more obvious translation errors.

rfoo2• 3 years ago

It's the mistranslation of room-temperature superconductivity.

"super islands" is likely translated from 超岛 which sounds the same as 超导 (superconductivity). I have no idea how 室温 (room-temperature) became extraterrestrial, must be extraordinarily bad speech to text model.

edit: could be 室温 (shi4wen1) -> shi4wai4 -> 室外(outdoors)/世外(out of this world) -> extraterrestrial

wg0• 3 years ago

I wish I could learn CJK. Will take a lifetime to master.

devindotcom• 3 years ago

What a hilarious mistranslation. Somehow it is fitting though, as a totally unprecedented floating material.

e63f67dd-065b2• 3 years ago

You're exactly right on the extraterrestrial part: the speech to text transcribed it as "最近我们这个有关世外超岛的话题非常的火热"

ansbalin• 3 years ago

The extraterrestrial super island of stability

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

Let's break one rule at the time, please. I don't think I'm quite ready for heavy elements that are long lived, either at room temperature or any other, and even less so if they turn out to be non-radioactive...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

bilsbie2• 3 years ago

Ok not sure how to phrase this:

Could there be small pieces of RTSC inside the sample (causing the floating)

But then enough impurities to not be able to complete a circuit through the sample?

And cooling makes other parts of the sample super conducting?

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

Could be insulated RTP superconducting crystals, grains, islands with the bulk being a high temperature superconductor?

bilsbie2• 3 years ago

Yes exactly.

bigmattystyles• 3 years ago

Novice question - does a material behaving as a superconductor occur all the sudden like a step function if resistance is plotted against temp and pressure - or does it ease into super conductor behavior?

(edit) Also is it resistance (aka if I remember my EE degree correctly), DC only or also impedance where frequency also matters?

weard_beard• 3 years ago

all at once. It instantaneously expels the magnetic field. You can observe experiments on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7gyZJg5nc#t=32m30s

4ad• 3 years ago

Only type-I superconductors expel significant magnetic fields. Virtually everything you see on YouTube is a type-II superconductor. type-I superconductors require liquid helium.

Also, only type-II superconductors can hover in a stable configuration near magnets. Flux pinning is required for that.

consilient2• 3 years ago

(edit) Also is it resistance (aka if I remember my EE degree correctly), DC only or also impedance where frequency also matters?

Just resistance. Impedance in an ideal BCS superconductor goes roughly as the square of the AC frequency.

sema2• 3 years ago

I do find that interesting... I found a graph of another HTSC's (YBCO) resistance vs temperature [1], and the function is much more discontinuous looking than the one shown in the article. That would lead me (someone not at all trained in the physics of superconductors) to believe that perhaps the purity of the sample is a factor here, with different parts of the sample having different critical temperatures, gradually decreasing resistance until an inflection point is reached at 110K.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-electrical-resistivi...

floxy5• 3 years ago

The ResearchGate chart has a linearly scaled y-axis, the Southeast University chart has a logarithmic scaled y-axis.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

It's like freezing water.

It happens at a single temperature. It doesn't happen at once, there is a small amount of heat you must take from the material before it becomes a superconductor. Regions of it become superconductors on the process, and those grow until the entire material change.

After the change, it becomes a stronger (yes, there is such a thing) superconductor the cooler it gets.

(Or, at least that's what happens to the kinds I know about. The thing is complex enough that I wouldn't be too surprised to learn about one that behaves differently.)

_0ffh• 3 years ago

After the change, it becomes a stronger (yes, there is such a thing) superconductor the cooler it gets

Do you mean the tradeoff between temperature, field strength and current? Like, if you lower the temperature, the SC will be able to handle a stronger field or more current in return?

999ms• 3 years ago

TOTK Sky Islands effect is what we're looking for.

floxy5• 3 years ago

Looks like it still goes superconducting at a magnetic field of 9 Tesla. Does that seem like a really high critical field?

klimt5• 3 years ago

YBCO which has a critical temperature of around 90K has a critical field in excess of 250T. So 9T is not expected to weaken superconductivity much for a sample with a critical temperature of 110K.

floxy5• 3 years ago

Wow 250T is pretty high. Was that measured or extrapolated?

hatsunearu4• 3 years ago

The Fig 3a)b) graphs are not showing superconductivity. That just looks like the resistance dips below the ~1e-5 mark and goes goes deep into the noise. That just looks like a normal conductor that has a positive temperature coefficient.

edit: to add speculation, I think they made something that's not quite LK-99, and it's behaving like a normal conductor with no superconductance.

barbegal2• 3 years ago

That would be my interpretation too. Usually you get a stronger transition to 0 at the critical temperature but I can't see this (although it could be hidden under the noise)

floxy5• 3 years ago

An excitation of 1mA and R = 1e-5 means the voltage is 10 nV (1e-8). Also the chart has a logarithmic y-axis.

hatsunearu4• 3 years ago

I know, I'm just saying their test condition has a really high noise floor and once you dive into the noise floor there is no meaningful result.

legulere2• 3 years ago

The noise is probably just an artefact from measurement.

hatsunearu4• 3 years ago

that's almost literally the definition of noise.

I'm saying the results are useless because the noise floor is obscuring any interesting behavior (if any).

Some people are saying "well, the Tc is 160K, so this result is invalid"--the way I see it, the Tc is not 160K because the test setup is so noisy so you're not really seeing any superconductivity at any temperature (not because it doesn't exist, but because their test setup is shitty)

ochn• 3 years ago

I also agree, looks like they just reached the instrument noise floor. This result should be taken with a grain of salt.

baq4• 3 years ago

What would be the acceptable noise floor here?

hatsunearu4• 3 years ago

that's the wrong way to look at this.

what i see in this noisy measurement is nothing interesting. that always means:

a) the noise is obscuring something interesting

b) there is nothing interesting

for a), if it's practical and/or likely that there is something interesting in the noise, I'd try to find a way to lower the noise (or SNR).

you would assert b) if you have some strong convictions that there's nothing interesting down there.

Since the assertion that LK-99 is superconducting at room temp, there's already enough data to say that this is either A) whatever they measured is not LK-99 B) whatever they measured is LK-99, but doesn't superconduct at room temp.

Their ridiculous interpretation pointing at the SNR=1 point saying that's the critical temperature is actually hilarious.

barbegal2• 3 years ago

This doesn't look superconducting at all to me, simply the sample is very small and below 110K the resistance of the sample is too small to be measured by their measurement equipment. I'm happy to be proved wrong but there should be a steeper transition at the critical temperature.

gus_massa3• 3 years ago

Note that the graphic is in log escale.

Also, it looks like it's more complicated https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Superconducting-transiti...

Also, IIUC the method makes a lot of small grains with different composition, and they may become superconductors at different temperature, and make a dirtier curve.

Also, not my research area, so I'm guessing a bit.

modeless2• 3 years ago

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?

saberdancer4• 3 years ago

I think most people are just seeing the headline 110K instead of realizing the implications (not a scam, not a mistake, hard to replicate).

I was quite sceptical earlier today due to unconvincing videos but this finding pushes it heavily into "This might be it" territory.

tootie2• 3 years ago

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?

prohobo• 3 years ago

From my perspective the story has went like this:

1. It's probably fake/fraud/error/hopium.

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.

aqme28• 3 years ago

I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting.

Which way would you have the prediction markets go? Is this evidence for or against room-temperature superconductivity?

modeless2• 3 years ago

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.

spandrew• 3 years ago

The initial claim was speculated to be room temp and ambient pressure superconduction. 110K is a far cry from that.

kulahan• 3 years ago

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.

ivalm• 3 years ago

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.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

Looks like 110K still puts this in the top 5 highest temp known superconductors and it only takes a couple of days to produce out of the blue.

So even if that's all it sounds like an important discovery.

gus_massa3• 3 years ago

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.

qwezxcrty• 3 years ago

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.

ramesh31• 3 years ago

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.

asdfman1235• 3 years ago

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.

EthanHeilman2• 3 years ago

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.

elcritch• 3 years ago

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.

freitzkriesler2• 3 years ago

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.

cyberlurker• 3 years ago

Like ancient Roman concrete.

callalex2• 3 years ago

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?

refulgentis2• 3 years ago

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

ChadNauseam• 3 years ago

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.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

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?

staunton• 3 years ago

Metaculus has some markets on LK-99, for example

asdfman1235• 3 years ago

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.

codethief• 3 years ago

Yesterday someone posted a couple links and I remember this one:

https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...

cpleppert• 3 years ago

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

mike_d• 3 years ago

The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance.

Can you explain how you would make that measurement? It seems like your testing equipment would need to be made of superconductors as well, right?

jimmySixDOF• 3 years ago

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.

_hypx• 3 years ago

It seems pretty similar to BSCCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copp...

snitty2• 3 years ago

YBCO superconducts as high as about 93K, so we're talking 17K difference. Which is useful but not wildly so. LN2 boils at 77K, for reference.

EthanHeilman2• 3 years ago

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.

[0]: Overview of the SPARC tokamak. Journal of Plasma Physics https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...

Robotbeat3• 3 years ago

Mercury based cuprate superconductors go even higher than YBCO, like 145K at ambient pressure.

nullc• 3 years ago

for YBCO the critical field increases the further you get from its threshold temp.

If being further from the threshold temp implies a higher critical field then that is very useful.

uj8efdjkfdshf• 3 years ago

The one interesting thing I should note is that synthesis of the copper phosphide intermediate tends to result in a copper deficient product, so I wonder if the presence of lattice defects in this might have an effect on where the copper atoms intercalate in the lattice.

ugh123• 3 years ago

The linked video mentions something about "outer space islands" in the subtitles. Is that just bad auto-translation or did they seriously discover something amazing?

coolspot• 3 years ago

They found “islands” of superconductivity on the resistivity graph.

proprietario• 3 years ago

see this other comment[0] its most likely a translation issue

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36975492

legulere2• 3 years ago

I'm curious why the resistance is dropping by a lot in figure 3 a) between around 230 and 260 K

klimt5• 3 years ago

The jump looks like bad contacts to me. The wires you attach undergo stress during the cooldown, and such artefacts can happen with small samples. Rewiring the sample should get rid of it.

saberdancer4• 3 years ago

Huge news. This means it is not a scam as a discovery of this type of superconductor would be big enough.

It also means it is unlikely they were measuring wrong for multiple years.

My layman take is that Korean sample is just a better or different batch that is properly superconducting at room temperature.

carabiner3• 3 years ago

As a layman, how do you know this is huge?

d1str0• 3 years ago

Assuming they discovered a low cost, room temperature, room pressure, superconductor, there are many HUGE technological advancements that can be made that would impact your daily life.

Possibilities include improved battery longevity in all devices(probably in an order of magnitude), low friction transport improvements (ie. cheaper high speed rail), and faster and higher bandwidth wired connections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_...

vl• 3 years ago

I don’t know why people say it’s huge, so far all the images released show it is tiny.

saberdancer4• 3 years ago

Until today main hypothesis was that it is a scam by original team or a mistake when measuring resistance.

Now it looks unlikely as it would be very strange to luck into a new superconductor (pretty "good" one too) if they were faking it. It also means it is unlikely they made fundamental measuring mistakes such as thinking the sample is in room temperature when it was at 100K.

What seem plausible is that the process to make the material is not well defined and that there is high degree of variability. Even this chinese 110K replication only one of 6 samples shows superconductivity, meaning there is much room for improvement, perhaps with fine tuning they will find sample with characteristics that Korean team observed.

tgtweak• 3 years ago

Some potential applications for disruption:

Sub-sea cables that are the size of current fiber-optic bundles, which can transmit terawatts of energy with minimal/no losses. The bottom of the ocean is, ironically, at much higher pressure than atmosphere and would actually help increase the tolerances for superconductivity. This means: areas that have abundant power resources can export it with minimal infrastructure costs. Installing the transmission lines in this manner would be orders of magnitude cheaper than current high voltage DC transmission, and could likely bridge entire continents together. The #1 hold back on offshore wind is getting the energy from the farm to the onshore landing point. The energy loss and step-up/step-down transformers, with maintenance on those in kind, can be 30-40% of the project cost. You can also eliminate expensive and inefficient transformers on both ends since you can leave the voltage at generation-levels vs stepping it up to hundreds of thousands of volts in order to transmit it, which adds a lot of complexity. Under-utilized Hydroelectric capacity in northern Quebec could power Southern US states.

The carry on from this in terms of the reduction in required infrastructure for power transmission and delivery is massive. Think of all the copper and aluminum required today to build huge transformers, step up and step down electricity, and get it from the generation plants to your home or business. You could effectively power an entire household on a cable the size of a fishing line compared to cables the size of a sharpie.

The same applies to electronics - if there is a way to use this superconductor in transistors and microchips - the heat loss from operation could be reduced to nil, meaning you can have a chip with little/no thermal loss while operating. This eliminates the need for expensive cooling (again, typically copper or aluminum) and also all the complexity/cost associated with that. The power consumption of these chips is typically a result of the electricity losses as the current is driven into the chip at low voltage. Less thermal waste means much higher efficiency chips, which means less power required to operate them, which means much less consumption (and battery required to supply it). Mobile phones built with superconducting components and chips could last weeks on a standard battery since almost all the power consumption would be the radio, speakers and the screen.

Since the superconducting temperature claimed by the initial team (127 °C) is much higher than most ambient temperatures, this means the potential applications are essentially anywhere outside of a heat source.

Batteries and battery packs could be miniaturized to some extent - reducing transmission losses and eliminating heat on low voltage power means you can reduce the amount of copper required in a battery pack, and inside the battery itself, by a significant margin. This leads to lighter batteries out of the gate. Coupled with lighter cables to carry the power and lighter/cooler electronics to manage and distribute that power and manage the heat - the weight savings could be very significant.

The potential for miniaturization and displacement of heavy/expensive/bulky traditional conductors is very large and not possible to understate.

eunos• 3 years ago

Almost all replication attempts are done on Bilibili, which namesake Mikoto Misaka using Railgun which would be made by superconductors.

Very beautiful.

blkhp19• 3 years ago

Shouldn't the title say "above 110 K" ?

Havoc• 3 years ago

The fact that result seem to be all over the place has me hopeful.

If it was just straight up wrong/fraud it wouldn't be playing out like this.

Perhaps with some finetuning we'll nail it down.

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

Can someone with field expertise explain the implications if this material were real / replicable / cheaply manufacturable? I see a lot of breathless excitement in these comments, as if free energy and perpetual motion machines are right around the corner, but from the few details I've delved into it's more like the electric grid might get 10% more efficient, MRIs might get a little cheaper, etc.

What are the exciting and apparently obvious applications that have everyone so excited? Is it a fusion / tokamak containment thing, that the cost of cooling current superconducting magnets is one of the big barriers to net energy generation?

ijustlovemath2• 3 years ago

Transmission loss is a real and important reason why you can't, say, cover the Sahara with solar panels to get unlimited free energy for mainland Europe and Africa (barring all the logistical challenges of actually pulling something like that off). This is because you lose a significant amount of energy just by moving it from one place to another.

With RTP superconductors, you get near perfect transmission from the site of energy production to the site of consumption. You could put wind turbine in remote sections of Montana and power up Chicago, something which previously would have been impossible.

nazgulnarsil• 3 years ago

Sahara solar panels were economically viable according to multiple studies, and there have been some limited plans made, but it has turned out politically non viable so far. Transmission losses are smaller than often assumed.

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

From what I've read, grid transmission losses are something like 5-10% - e.g. this page (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3) cites 5% in the US. Fine and nice, but seems incremental, not earth shattering, and I wonder about the logistics / ROI of manufacturing thousands of miles of LK-99 cables to achieve that. But maybe I'm missing something.

saulrh2• 3 years ago

The BIG change is if this supports high magnetic flux densities, in which case literally everything that depends on magnetism or magnets or electromagnets gets an order of magnitude better - ten times as much power per unit of heat disappeared and ten times as much power per unit of mass or volume or just ten times more powerful. Remember how battery energy density increased by a factor of five (nicads -> lithium-ion) and we suddenly had quadcopters and flashlights that could burn paper at ten paces and handheld vacuum cleaners the size of a soda can that could suck pet hair out of shag carpets and cars running off batteries? Imagine that happening again.

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

But wait - modern electric motors, for example, are something like 80-95% efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_motor#Efficiency), which implies there's not a ton of room to grow. Do superconductors somehow enable 10x more torque output for the same watt of electricity? Or is it that you could have a small motor in the palm of your hand that can consume huge amounts of electricity and produce enough torque to crack a diamond?

codedokode• 3 years ago

Transporting solar energy from deserts.

hbossy• 3 years ago

Avatar 3 merchandise will definitely include floating rocks of Unobtanium.

im3w1l• 3 years ago

For some reason what my brain keeps imagining is pulling out a drawer of a cabinet and it being perfectly silent and butter smooth because it uses mag-lev instead of wheels.

Mag-lev based bearings might be nice too.

jacquesm37• 3 years ago

That's already possible.

klimt5• 3 years ago

This is my first comment on this material, because I've been skeptical, but this result shouldn't be understated. It basically confirms the existence of a new family of high-temperature superconductors, the first of its kind since the cuprates in 1986. And for context, in the initial paper on the cuprates the critical temperature was measured to be 36 K. By synthesising other members of the cuprate family and optimising the growth, it was possible to raise it to 127 K in the subsequent few years. The 110 K seen today for LK-99 sets a baseline, and it's a very good baseline at that. Confirm me as excited.

klimt5• 3 years ago

The jump at 250K looks like bad contacts to me that fixed themselves during cooldown. Rewiring the sample and remeasuring should get rid of it. The field dependence is indeed a bit weird. One would expect the critical temperature to reduce with increasing magnetic field (magnetic field weakens superconductivity), but here you don't see that. It's expected that the superconductivity is very strong for such a high critical temperature and the fields applied are not strong enough, but with better measurements you should still see a small reduction in the critical temperature.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

It basically confirms the existence of a new family of high-temperature superconductors, the first of its kind since the cuprates in 1986.

Specifically, it seems, a family based on a novel superconductivity mechanism. If this a real effect, there's not only significant scope to improve LK-99 synthesis, but also scope to find new materials that could use the same mechanism that operate at even higher temperatures, are easier or cheaper to produce, or that can move more current.

distortionfield2• 3 years ago

One of the DFT papers suggested gold or silver for doping agents and, I’m no expert in the field but I feel like there’s a ton of room to explore the doping process of this material.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

My intuition tells me that the theory here will be more interesting than the current application, LK99. If it pans out then thousands of brilliant minds will iterate on the theory to expand it and to refine applications of it.

coryfklein• 3 years ago

Why are all these materials confirmations coming from Chinese speaking scientists? Do scientists in the US not do materials science so much?

tigershark4• 3 years ago

I guess that you can thank the DEA for this specific case…

username3322112• 3 years ago

What about European or Japanese scientists? And about Korean scientists not part of the original team?

The last should also be able to get their hands on a sample provided by the original team and won't have to do reproduction attempts, right?

xdennis• 3 years ago

The Drug Enforcement Administration? What does that have to do with physics?

carabiner3• 3 years ago

996 culture

hiddencost• 3 years ago

US does fine; likely in less of a rush to be first-past-the-post on announcing results. When the big US labs announce, they will likely be more careful and vetted and authoritative.

fragmede• 3 years ago

I'd expect DuPont, BASF, Apple, Google, Intel, IBM, GE, Kodak if any of their labs remain, any number of biotech labs like Genentech might have that are sufficiently mat-sci adjacent, all of the major of universities; MIT, Harvard, etc. Any of the national labs. Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, whichever are appropriate. It's just that whole DEA and red phosphorus being a meth precursor making it difficult. Yay, war on drugs.

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

Because the US/EU labs are being methodological and careful. This is by far the most reputable result to come out of China so far on LK-99

manav• 3 years ago

good not great.

e63f67dd-065b2• 3 years ago

The actual video is here: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1pM4y1p7u5

Short summary (not a physicist and consume most of my science in English, so may be slightly wrong):

- The material is fragile, and hard to form into a regular shape

- There's a weird drop in resistance around 230K; could be an artefact of the measurement process or instrument

- On 1 Aug they found a sample with almost 0 resistance, which got them really excited and led to them searching for more

- They tested 6 samples, only one of which exhibited zero resistance at below 110K

Basically, results are inconclusive, but it's promising.

crakenzak• 3 years ago

Just FYI, the wikipedia page for LK-99 has a very useful tracking grid of replication attempts with sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99

m3kw9• 3 years ago

This so far is saying this stuff isn’t room temp superconductor, but a high temp superconductor which means the paper is mistitled and didn’t deserve all the hype

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

Incredibly poor showing on HN around these issues. Lay people vastly over estimate their ability to reason/comment on physics issues.

LK-99: Team of Southeast University observed zero resistance below 110 K

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