Smash the samples… see if any of the grains float… (it’s becoming a bit of a refrain on Twitter whenever a big chunky pressed pellet sample is published as a failed replication) … it won’t be hard to improve the process and try and get larger contiguous samples that show the effect once we know for sure that it’s actually happening even if it’s happening in smaller more obviously superconducting samples, be it the size of a sand grain or a grain of rice, as long as it’s clearly a room temperature superconductor… once we have more samples… the analysis experts can get stuck in, there’s a global army of analytical experts… crystallographers, spectrographers, and all the sub disciplines of analytical chemistry… with clearly superconducting samples these people can swing into action and work out what the magic is and what we have to do to make more and bigger floating rocks.
I was looking at the floating sample picture and it struck me as odd how the material levitates at an angle. [0] The broken part floating and the "pressed" part resting on the plate. To me, this suggests that a significant amount of the material is not the target material.
Further, if the target material was evenly distributed, I'd expect that levitation properties would correlate with the thickness of the piece and the piece would float, evenly. Right, if a 1mm piece has 1unit of levitation, a 5mm piece should have 5 units of levitation. If the 1mm piece levitates, then the 5mm portion should as well.
Since it's not levitating evenly, I suspect the target material is unevenly distributed. Further, I'd argue that the target material is actually consolidated to a single piece of that sample. Perhaps (conjecture) that little silver spec near the tip of the crack.
From what I've been reading, it seems like it's very, very hard to trick the copper into the right place. It seems possible that the process does work, but a lot of luck is needed to create a large enough piece to support the levitation effect.
It's almost like someone stuck a "super strong" helium balloon in the center of a half-eaten cake. The helium balloon lifts the cake, but the weight of the uneaten half of the cake causes tilt.
0 - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384782-room-temperatur...
Metastable alloys (roughly, alloys that are only stable at room temperature because the atoms get frozen in place too quickly for them to reach the energetically favorable positions) are quite common in materials science, both for bulk metals and for semiconducting crystals. There are far more possible metastable alloys than stable alloys, so the range of material properties possible in metastable alloys is far wider than that in stable alloys. So, considering we have never discovered a room temperature superconductor, so far, it wouldn't be particularly surprising if it requires a metastable alloy.