The Verge of the Stars: Finding New Physics with a Superconductor that is Safe at Room Temperature and Ambient Pressure

A superconductor that is safe at room temperature isnt just a prize. If you’ve patented it, it’s incalculable value essentially.”

We could still potentially see some of the things that a room-temperature superconductor is supposed to usher in, even if it’s never discovered. Think of perfectly efficient superconducting electricity grids and more powerful medical imaging machines. Those developments might depend on more incremental improvements to make existing superconducting materials cheaper to manufacture and easier to deploy.

The experts talked with The Verge to try and sort out the science from the hype. They are skeptical about the success of this kind of superconductor, one that can conduct electricity with zero resistance in room temperature and ambient pressure. To be sure, we’re still waiting for more definitive answers from everyone trying to verify the claims about LK-99. The Verge also wanted to know — if LK-99 actually does what it’s supposed to — what comes next?

“If it can’t be manufactured, it’s a laboratory curiosity — one that will win a Nobel Prize — but it’s still a curiosity. It’s a really long way from a material which everybody can get excited about as a physics experiment to something which an engineer will say, ‘Yes, I’m going to buy that and put it in my machine,’” “Grovenor says.”

Researchers at the Argonne NationalLaboratory and the FAMU- FSU College of Engineering have yet to release their results. “Within a week or two, we’re going to have 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100 labs that will have done various syntheses. It’s going to be clear very quickly.

“That’s just not good for the field. It makes us very wary of claims where people cannot reproduce their data. Mason says so. “Science works by reproduction and by our ability to be open with each other and test each other’s results.”

The Rochester High Magnetic Field Laboratory (LK-99): A Superconductor Made From Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Lutium

Researchers from Rochester tried again. They published a paper in March about a superconductor made from nitrogen, hydrogen and rare earth metal lutetium. The story of a fictional material in Star Trek that forms black holes inspired them to call it reddmatter. That paper is still under scrutiny, especially since one of the key researchers from Rochester faces separate allegations of plagiarism and data fabrication in his other work.

“This discovery is completely out of the blue,” says David Larbalestier, chief materials scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and professor at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. “I have no idea what the idea, frankly, behind doping this [mineral] with copper was.”

The term zero resistance is not defined very clearly in the preprints, according to one of the University of Illinois physicists. Superconductors should have zero electrical resistance, but the preprints show “zero” on a scale that makes it difficult to tell whether LK-99 is truly a perfect superconductor or just a very good conductor. Mason says that metal is a really good conductor. It is still not perfect. In heat, you lose a lot of energy. That’s why our laptops get hotter and why you can’t use the power grid. So it really matters whether you have a perfect conductor or a really good conductor.”

The researchers did not perform a heat anomalies test that is standard for major laboratories. “All superconductors that have ever been proven to be superconductors show this specific heat anomaly,” he says. “If there is no specific heat anomaly, it ain’t a superconductor.”

To start, there were inconsistencies in the data; the two preprints disagree with each other. There are three authors who are named in one paper, and six in the other. The preprint with fewer authors contains “many defects,” an author of the other paper told New Scientist. The author, William & Mary physics research professor Hyun-Tak Kim, also said that the preprint was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. Kim and other authors of the papers didn’t respond when we asked them.

Those preprints are crucial for the efforts we are seeing to try to duplicate them. That issue is not the only one that makes experts pause. In their interview with The Verge they raised a number of concerns.

To start, LK-99 rose to fame after it was described in preprints, research papers that haven’t been subject to peer review. More or less the gold standard for publishing new research is to be published in a peer reviewed journal. Two preprints were published in late July on the server arXiv, and a related study was published in the Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology earlier this year.

Frustrated by the atmosphere of hype, some scientists have taken to mimicking the levitation videos with everyday materials suspended by string and other props. A physicist at a New York university noticed a bunch of videos with small floating pebbles when he opened the social networking site. In response, he uploaded a video featuring a “sample of LK-99 shaped as a fork” suspended by tape. He wondered how anyone could be convinced by it.

The limited success of the replication attempts has not quelled speculation online. Unverified videos of samples, supposedly levitating because of superconductivity, have circulated as viral evidence, despite the fact that many materials — including graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.

If future experiments show flat bands, the material won’t be able to show room-temperature superconductivity. The association between flat bands and superconductivity comes from other materials, such as ‘twisted’ layers of graphene — slightly offset sheets of atomically thin carbon — which displayed superconductivity at -271 °C (1.7 K) and featured flat bands. This does not provide evidence of superconductivity in the lead-based LK-99.

Why is LK-99 so different from the other lead phosphate minerals? An online discussion of a theory paper by Sinead Griffin

Griffin agrees that knowing the structure is essential. She says that the structure found by the Korean team, similar to that of other leadphosphate minerals, is similar. “So it’s not too bizarre to think it possible.”

All of the theory papers had the same assumption about the structure, which is why they all suggested the presence of flat bands. “In a nutshell, I don’t believe any of the DFT before I know the correct crystal structure,” she says.

On 31 July, a theoretical analysis posted on Twitter prompted excitement among online enthusiasts. Sinéad Griffin, who studies quantum materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, shared her theory paper, accompanied by a gif of former US president Barack Obama performing a ‘mic drop’. The optimism was sparked by the fact that LK-99 has flat bands and that they are strongly correlated with each other. Flat band systems tend to show interesting physics. People are excited when a material has a flat band.

Robert Palgrave, a chemist at University College London, said the materials of both teams differ from the original. The X-ray patterns from the Korean team are vastly different from the patterns from the other team. (Members of the Beihang team did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.)

A co-author on the National Physical Laboratory team, physicist Veerpal Singh Awana, acknowledged small differences between their sample and that of the Korean team. He says that the LK-99 is similar to the LK-99 that was reported.

The Korean team described the process for mixing powdered components and two stages of heating up to 980 C, which was how replicas first attempted to synthesise LK-99. Concerns have been raised about amateur replication attempts because of the high temperatures and use of lead.