Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts
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The most strongly diamagnetic materials that aren't a superconductor are bismuth and pyrolytic carbon, a graphite-like material.
Bismuth has a density of about 10g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength (X) of -16.6 x 10^-5. It won't levitate above a magnet because it's just too heavy.
Pyrolytic carbon has a density of 2g/cm^3, and a diamagnetic strength of -40 x 10^-5. Thin sheets of this lightweight material will levitate over strong magnets, provided the magnetic field alternates in a chessboard pattern.
LK-99 must be similar in density to bismuth, and the videos (like below) show large chunks of it levitating. If it's not a superconductor, it's the most diamagnetic room temperature material ever seen, by orders of magnitude.
And on top of that, if pure diamagnetism were at work, the samples would have to slide off the magnet. They wouldn't stay there and float. It's similarly unclear why the material seems to always float at an angle. It seems to track the field lines in some way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/science/lk-99-superconduc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism#Materials Diamagnetic strength = susceptibility
My background: physics, but not superconductors.
I've seen some people talking about the LK-99 samples only having these properties locally due to internal structure or something like that, could that not explain the angle if one part of the sample had more "pockets" of material with these properties than another part?
[0]: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248 apologies for the Twitter link, I didn’t have time to find a better source.
So you won’t find any other sources, other than other people who have also been misled by @8teAPi.
Frustrating because it’s also chaotic, trying to keep the events straight.
If it’s not a superconductor, can it still be used for e.g. maglev trains?
I think that there's no reason to assume that negative results right now are conclusive, whereas positive results are strongly indicative.
Superconductivity in LK-99 moves along a similarly anisotropic two-dimensional plane.
There is nothing 2-dimensional about the Apatite structure, and the preprints I have seen do not show any kind of “quasi two-dimensional” structure. If anything, it’s more like an array of tubes and chains, more 1D than 2D. Do you have a source making this claim?
First, you’re not talking about synthesis anymore. And if you try to grow a single crystal, how easy it is to get polycrystals from powder is not really relevant. Ease to synthesise and ease to assemble are very different things and both are controlled by different phenomena.
Also, again, not really. Graphene is quasi 2-dimensional and very easy to bunch up and form graphite, for example. Boron nitride, not that much.
> For 3D material you could probably just grind your impure sample down into a powder, isolate the grains that levitate, and press them back together.
You can do something like that (hot or cold pressing), but it still requires the right material to be synthesised in the first place. It works more or less well depending on chemistry and physical properties, not dimensionality.
Separating “grains that work” and “grains that don’t” is not something we really do when we create materials. It sounds more like QA in semiconductors than something we’d do in a lab.
> That wouldn't preserve structures in 2D though, let alone 1D.
Why not? If you grind a 2-D structure joint you just get flat grains. How well they assemble depends on their properties.
The whole discussion is not very productive: however truthy it sounds, dimensionality does not control how easy it is to synthesise a material. Apatites are very easy to make. Things like chalcogenide glasses are easy to make despite having a 1-dimensional structure at the atomic scale. There are many other examples. And, also again: it does not matter because apatites are fully 3-d structures, with linear elements if you squint and ignore how these elements are placed in the overall structure.
My reading of the situation was that they have been making this stuff for quite a while (years!), but haven't had the funding or manufacturing expertise to start scaling up and properly improving the process. They are a tiny research lab. The suggestion seems to be that one newer (now former) member of the lab just thought F-this we need to publish, get it out there and start moving forward.
If it is real, the level of investment in finding ways to make this stuff is going to explode. It may be hard to make, but that won't stop us from finding a way to make it on a large scale if it truly is revolutionary.
Further to that, from other groups studying it we will potentially find better and easer to make alternatives.
It’s called LK-99 as it was discovered in 1999.
The 99 in the name comes from the date the lab was formed, 1999. Some sources suggest that they have been studying this exact material since 1999, although I don't think that is confirmed.
I think it's safe to assume that they would have been making it for at least 1-2 years before the rejected Nature paper, although potentially significantly longer than that.
So they have been making it somewhere between 4 and 24 years...
Looking at how small the fragments are that other lambs are creating, I assume it's taken them years to get to the point that they can make larger lumps of the stuff that have any sort of uniform structure.
They seem to have been trying to perfect it before publishing.
> The name of the material comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the year 1999, when they say they first synthesized LK-99.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/science/lk-99-superconduc...
If I baked a cake once 23 years ago and once yesterday, I can't really say I've been baking for 23 years.
Katalin Karikó was working on mRNA vaccine technology for decades on a relatively tiny budget, and was turned down by many larger groups based on the supposed impossibility of the concept.
You have to wonder how many future technologies are languishing right now in some basement lab where a couple of frustrated scientists are making do with a shoestring budget and are desperate to get their research published.
Outside of that, positive results only weakly imply LK-99 is real.
Hey, what does this actually mean? Like, space is 3D and I don't think you're claiming all LK99 samples are all literally-one-atom-thick, so clearly it's a 3D object.
I'd guess it means that the material has very regular layers, but (much like graphene) I've never actually seen someone directly say what "two-dimensional material" means 3-dimensionally.
Some more complex materials do not have this symmetry, and the ability of the electrons to tunnel is much stronger in some directions than others. In many known high temperature superconductors electrons are more or less confined to move in a 2d plane (even though a lump of the material is obviously a 3d object) so they are called "quasi-2d".
In other materials they are confined to move in only one direction, which seems to be the case with LK-99
The reason is simple. They work for a private company. Not a university. Not a public lab.
They do not reveal the process for the same reason than openAI does not reveal its process. It is because they are sitting on a quadrillion dollars opportunity and they want to grab it.
Similarly as OpenAI, many initiatives are trying to make an open source alternative so they have a risk of not profiting from their extraordinary invention.
However, they acknowledge that the process is difficult to get right and claim that they have had to run it many times to get the results that they are claiming.
I don't have any clue about materials science, but I can imagine why this would be the case.
What is called an international patent is just a standardized application so that only one national patent office has to examine it. If it is accepted, other national offices will grant the patent much more easily since the hard work has already been done.
And here, there is an international application, so what I think is that there is already a patent in Korea, but it is still pending for other countries.
The last action one of my previous employers took was to send me payments for a patent I'm named on when they filed it in the EU. I had already quit, but it was easier to just send me the check than to cancel it :-)
If I understand correctly, one of their colleagues forced their hand by dumping the first preprint on Arxiv without consent of the rest of the team.
Yes, but the reason is a different one: It's that they're busy writing / publishing a journal-grade paper and so they have postponed helping out other labs with reproduction efforts to the time after that. (Source: Hyun-Tak Kim said this in some interview.)
The existence and effect of it should suffice.
How it is produced is a later step.
We need higher quality samples in order to determine whether the thing actually superconducts, because it's really hard to measure the resistance of small grains of material buried inside a mostly useless rock.
It is certainly not a part of the puzzle here.
The puzzle is to reproduce the experiment, but you claim the original experiment itself is bogus...
Why are we so obsessed with finding out whether the original authors did their homework? Science is not about crediting or discrediting people, it's about collaborating and standing on one another's shoulders to find out truths about the world. If LK-99 turns out to be a superconductor, it doesn't matter if the original paper was glaringly incomplete. If LK-99 doesn't pan out, it matters even less.
I highlighted "necessary" and "verify" because your wording of your question somewhat hides the motivations of the labs.
Multiple labs around the world are not just doing a "homework assignment" to academically verify someone else's work. Instead, the tantalizing idea of a "room-temperature superconductor" would be a miracle material and That Scientific Leap In Progress is why independent labs are racing to reproduce it.
Same excitement of so-called "replication" would happen if somebody put out a plausible "cold fusion" paper or a workable synthesis of a new "drug molecule" to cure cancer. Multiple labs around the world would be motivated to implement their own cold fusion machine and cancer drug. It isn't "necessary" that they replicate it. Instead, they're genuinely excited about making their own miracle devices/drugs and possibly extending the scientific discoveries beyond the original authors' findings.
You mean like this? https://twitter.com/gigaj0ule/status/1686814611658715136
IF they are correct and they have an RT superconductor, then it's a highly political decision on who gets sent some samples. Like, all their former colleagues and collaborators will be pissed if they don't get any. But you also would want to send some samples to someone who you know has 1) all the necessary equipment to confirm your claim, 2) has the necessary publication history to make him/her a trustworthy expert on high temperature superconductivity that others would believe, 3) would not want to slow down your progress just so he/she can gain an advantage.
And with something with such huge potential for applications as RT superconductivity, you then also get vested national interests where your national physics society or research ministry might be pissed off if you don't involve enough researchers from the country which funded your research.
Honestly, if I was in their shoes I'd be delaying me sending out my samples into the world as well.
Of course this all hinges on whether they actually have a room-temperature superconductor or not. If they don't actually have one then the delay tactic could also just be in hopes for this all to blow over without them having to prove their findings.
Publishing verified claims to help others would be secondary.
tldr; for good or bad, humanity hasn’t found an incentive mechanism better than capitalism for deploying tech at scale.
It is pretty big pot to get part of if you discover way to refine the process, or find adjacent material with similar or better characteristics.
* Potentially do it better/purer
* Get a few news articles, and a mention in a very high traffic Wikipedia page
* Again if they do it well, get 8 figures in funding pretty easily. While during any other day they might be fighting for $50,000 here and $100,000 there
TL;DR: Normal magnets have two poles, and will try to flip themselves around to achieve a lower energy state. You cannot levitate a normal magnet on another magnet without mechanical stabilization. Superconducting materials actively repel all magnetic field lines and can achieve levitation without external stabilization.
Technically it can be done with an array of magnets with opposing polarities.
Without more details from on this video's source and legitimacy, one could argue that an array of magnets is hiding under the 'single magnet' cover plate.
I am not saying this is a hoax, but as exciting as this seems we just have to wait it out for more replication publications to make that call.
How?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism#/media/File:Diama...
To which I added:
"I am not saying this is a hoax, but as exciting as this seems we just have to wait it out for more replication publications to make that call"
It has been a little over 2 weeks since the first pre-print from Korea University.
The hashing out of a fabrication process with less impurities will be a long process. My point is not that everyone is pulling a con, my point is that we need to wait it out.
The mechanical stabilisation is right there in plain sight where one side of the magnet is clearly resting on the other magnet (physically in contact). Anyone who’s played around with magnets that are heavy and too weak to flip themselves around will not be satisfied with this video. It could be explained by two South Poles opposing each other.
What I don't get is why they don't just pulverize the sample, put it in a magnetic field, and then sift out the floaty particles.
Things floating at an angle and halfway make me very suspicious.
Also, why are all these videos like 5 seconds long? The stuff is supposedly superconducting at room temperature and would supposedly float indefinitely. Why not just put up a 24/7 livestream, do stuff like pass strings/paper/loops/etc around it.
I think this material is very interesting, but all the videos I see are so clownish that I am getting more skeptical as time goes on.
I don't really think anything about LK-99 is optimistic at this point, honestly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/08/03/ro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/08/02/lk...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/08/04/lk...
Plenty more from less "historic MSM outlets". Looks like the MSM has been writing more than a few LK99 articles in the past 5 days!
If you are at a national lab and replicate this you would have to do so with a very high level of detail and diligence before disclosing to the press. I am pretty sure that every PI of every lab will be demanding that all process and material is submitted to them and then going over it with a fine tooth comb before putting their name to it.
The private folks have much less to lose, as well as (possibly) more to gain.
Big institutions have a reputation to protect, which in this case means being extra careful before making any revolutionary claims.
I don't really think that either is bad, but I would expect confirmations from the stratosphere to come in quite a bit later. Also, it is vacation time in the Northern Hemisphere, so many bigger institutions will be staffed by minimal crews only - mostly by younger people, who don't have kids yet, but don't have much decision authority either.
In the Dept. of Algebra where I studied, it was uncommon to meet a professor in summer, much less several of them at the same time. The postdocs were present, but not the big wigs.
Accredited institutions often have established protocols, rigorous peer review processes, and accountability mechanisms that contribute to their credibility. However, it's worth considering that unofficial institutions might have some advantages too, such as more freedom to explore unconventional approaches and potentially quicker adaptation to emerging trends.
If the results are to be believed the crystaline structure is hard to achieve as replacing the right parts with Cu seems borderline random.
less perfect synthesis materials (some of the unofficial institutions have even admitted to using subsitutes for some of the synthesis) so perhaps worse ovens that cannot sustain perfect temps, or substitute materials in some way help the right crystals to show up.
The original Korean lab said they only had a 10% success rate and admit the ppublished synthesis is incomplete because it is waiting full journal approval for the paper to come out.
So we should wait until we have better data, better replication and tbh a working theory of how it even works because it shows odd magnetic behaviour, whether its superconducting or not
Why would they have to wait for the paper to come out? Couldn't they just publish the steps in a blog post or something before the journal has approved the paper?
It's a nice primer on the topic as he touches on LK-99.
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https://www.goal.com/en/news/what-does-can-they-do-it-on-a-c...
But warnings about extremely obnoxious and only temporarily stoppable video ads (no ad-blocker at work unfortunately).
"You're gonna need a bigger bowl of popcorn!"
In other words, if I put a lump of random stuff without any real interesting properties and a very motivated and sleep deprived scientist in a lab with all possible test equipment, what would be a probability of getting some kind of test result that would look yellow or green in that table?
Instead of putting your money there, why not invest in some of the labs that are trying to reproduce the science?
* [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10948-023-06593-6
Like, why aren't they consulting with the best lab to make some rocks that are great and prove their theory?
I haven't seen any interviews, or much of anything, from the original authors. Everyone is just trying to reverse engineer from scratch
But I understand nothing of this field
What's the general consensus here, real or not?
It will likely spur a lot of new solid state physics research.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/15i3h9d/lk99_megat...
HN is a tech forum, plenty of smart people in there, but also plenty of people who think they know more than they really do. Lots of arrogance in here. I am guilty of it myself, and some of my posts got a lot of upvotes even though it was way out of my field of expertise. I try to get things right, fact checking and all that, but my opinion is certainly not worth that of an expert.
All that to say that on tech matters, I think HN is pretty good, because that's where the tech guys go. But for physics, I'd go for r/physics.
That's really not true. It's unclear whether it's a superconductor, but the consensus worst-case outcome is that something very unexpected is happening, which is in itself worth learning more about.
If someone can show both diamagnetism and prove that it is not a superconductor then that would be pretty discouraging.
If someone can show that it is diamagnetic and not superconducting then that could be evidence that they recreated the same material, but that it doesn't show superconductivity.
And it would go a way in explaining why so many take the claims seriously and try to replicate it, if we know there's something exciting going on either way.
First, a theoretical study found that the phase that’s reported to be superconducting is likely to be metastable based on some density functional theory calculations. That implies that actually making it may be rather difficult, and raises the bar for reproductions to show exactly what they are finding is superconducting or not. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
The second study was a comparison of the properties of superconducting Pb thin films with some of the data people have been reporting on LK-99 repro attempts. The authors hypothesize that people are getting micron to several nanometer sized particles of the superconducting phase embedded in an amporphous non-superconducting phase, and that this explains the mixed results. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01723
So, more careful analysis is needed and I’m still optimistic. I want to see much better x-ray and microscopic characterization along with the resistance data and so on, especially because the property measurements can be tricky. (My background is materials science but not superconductivity or condensed matter physics if that matters)
The only thing we need is solid evidence that it's superconducting. If anyone has a stone that's superconducting at room temperature, then we know it's out there, it's possible to make it. It doesn't matter so much how it was made. If it exists, that's a great step in itself, isn't it?
The smaller the sample, the smaller the resistance is even if it's not superconducting, and all sorts of other effects come into play - i.e. your wires and leads have a resistance you need to account for, parasitic inductance and capacitance climbs etc.
A clear no would be multiple sources synthesizing a material that is clearly the same as LK-99 (e.g. by showing most or all of the behavior shown in the videos or described in one of the papers), and then showing experimentally that it isn't actually a superconductor but that some other effect is at play.
They say they are willing to let other labs examine their sample. If nothing has happened in two months i'll get worried, but for now I don't expect any lab to have seen it
2023-08-07T0608Z
Life is so much more beautiful and wondrous if you're willing to be vulnerable. Let people be excited.
Quite ironically though, individually policing & complaining about the relevance of specific subtopics indeed feels quite "Reddit", while one of the things that make HN so pleasant is exactly that it's user base usually abstains from arguing about such meta & leave moderating actual offtopic to the moderators.
To much noise and no signal. There's no point going down a rabbit hole on unconfirmed and low quality replication attempts. You'll hear about it elsewhere if it's actually replicated.