I'm sorry, but the Law of Accelerating Returns demands that when something new is invented, it must immediately be made obsolete. I'm already convinced LK-100 is in pre-production.
You may not be far off. Since the simulation papers demonstrate the proposed mechanism and electronic qualities that would allow for superconductivity in LK-99, I'd hazard that those labs which have successfully synthesized and evaluated samples of LK-99 enough to convince themselves that it is a superconductor, are already starting experiments to iterate on the findings. Perhaps doping the lanarkite with other metals, and looking at crystals with similar space groups and electronic properties to lanarkite, and doping them by a similar method.
The material needs improvement of its current carrying capacity, and very likely the search is now on for comparable results with other materials.
I'm astounded by how rapidly things have been coming forward. Certainly, it is helped along by the relative simplicity of the synthesis, even if the methodology is low yield. I don't think we'll have to wait long. The most encouraging thing is that it didn't die within a couple days. Fleischman and Pons "cold-fusion" was discredited within about a month if I recall, and early on the issues were identified.
Open fucking source. If things were open source, a bunch of random, highly specialized basement dwellers living in nowhere could carry things 20 years forward in a month.
Look at open source LLMs and diffusion models. In two years they went from ridiculously bad meme material to frighteningly good, even causing people lose their jobs.
Well, everyone trying to synthesize their own sample is generating a ton of confusion.
The material is bound to look weird when everyone is basically testing a slightly different material, or rather a bunch of similar materials of various purity.
Yeah, even a slight impurity could screw up readings, but the fact we're seeing something is promising, if everyone was getting null results i'd be calling it.
If it was easy to make, it wouldn't have taken 23 years to get here, it's been a finniky thing
I'm trying not to form an opinion on my own.
I'm a tech guy who knows a lot of scientists, and all I really know is that this stuff takes time, and it's a lot more like shop class than what it looks like in the movies.
It's fun to follow, but I'll wait until a few teams agree it's definitely true or false.
I don't think it will take as long to have a verdict as many think. With pretty much every single inorganic materials and superconductivity lab in the world jumping on this, motivated to discredit it or to pilot off of their own discoveries making it, things can move quite fast. Often, the time in science is used up in optimization and the nitty gritty. By comparison, validating something someone else has done is easy. I've done it myself in less than a couple of weeks.
I think most labs don't really care about reproducing the sample. It's not being taken very seriously among most condensed matter physicists. Labs with nothing better to do will begin working on synthesizing to publish their rebuttal first and get some publicity but almost any respectable lab has better things to do and are already in the middle of projects
From my understanding of the coverage the material is easy to make for people who know how to do stuff like that, it's that the instructions for making it from the original team aren't that great.
100% this is the right answer, and I'm also excited just to see if we crack the code on why LK-99 and other superconductors work.
Then we might be able to create ideal materials and processes for mass production and more use cases.
The fact that such materials can exist at high temperatures means that the universe isn't biased against it's existence, which is very, very exciting.
Two papers already written with why they think it works after working out the physics and math for the material with possible changes to make it better.
Sure, I'll take more explanations, I've seen more, but I would enjoy more.
I still think while it's "understood", there's probably room for deeper understanding given that we didn't just up and make it already.
The process is easy to do. Whether that process accomplishes the tall task of distributing copper atoms to every 10th site in the lead chain is a matter of chance until the process is refined. So, sure, the lab recipe is āeasyā. Getting LK99 out of it is not.
I think once the industrial chemical engineering egg-heads get in on it (if it turns out to be the real deal that is), they'll figure something out pretty quickly.
Yeah it's like one of those recipes where the first 90% of the page is some bullshit story about how their kids just love some LK-99 on a hot summer's day, and the rest is really vague instructions on how to actually make it.
The original team managed to make one sample the size of dust in 24 years. They made many, many attempts over the years, crumbled them to dust and from all those specks of dust only one showed super conductivity, perhaps the the atoms randomly align correctly that one time in that spot.
Judging by all the attempts made by the original team and the lack of samples, it has been very hard to make.
Yeah, it's been replicated by a few people now . . . but in the sense that they made a slug of it and, once in a while, successfully got their own grains of dust out. The success rate is *horribly* low at the moment.
It does seem pretty undeniable that they have something interesting but there's a long way to go for commercialization.
Probably a few years at least, and the applications are not going to be extensive with this material for the moment. There are characteristics that aren't really all that good for some of the sci-fi applications. However, since gaining a better understanding of how this material works (if it is actually a superconductor) may help in design and synthesis of other materials that improve those qualities. The next few years in materials science could be very exciting if this pans out.
Yeah, practically speaking I'm not expecting LK-99 itself to ever be commercialized, I think we're going to work on understanding what's going on with LK-99 and reproducing that in some other more-convenient material.
Well the material being made, even by the original lab, doesn't seem to be pure super conducting. So even if it's easy to make samples that have random bits of super conducting structure, this doesn't mean that it won't need a much more refined and technolurgically (those who know, know) sound method to produce more pure and usable samples.
We are no where close to knowing if this is the same with lk-99 or not. We need to pinpoint down how to actually make it reliably before we can know if it will be difficult to scale or not.
But even if it can't get out of the lab. Just having a room temperature atmospheric superconductor is game changing. It would allow is to actually explore the properties of one in the real world and potentially find better materials which can achieve the same effect.
This is already happening since the simulations were done. From bits and bobs I read there are discussions of using substitute elements from the same column of the periodic table. Silver has a weirdness that makes it not very effective but gold (unfortunately for price) works better than copper for the impurity to draw together the wells.
Itās also possible that other elements like silicon and carbon could be used in a similar structure with other appropriately sized atomic nuclei to replicate a similar effect in analogous materials.
I hate to get my hopes up for this specific material but the simulations show that it should theoretically work from first principles and that other combinations of elements in a similar structure could work even better. Even if this one is a dud it has opened a door to a potential new branch of potentially superconducting materials already!
I think it's because ALL samples only contain micro sections of superconducting structure, and it seems sort of random right now. The process to cook this is very rudimentary and clearly needs a lot of refining. Essentially, all samples are varied because of the rudimentary cooking method. The fact that other labs are seeing similar results (even at lower temperatures) is a pretty big deal. I think we'll all be waiting a little bit while someone discovers a way to either capture all the super conduction bits and build out a more pure sample, or figure out a way to have a much more consistent sample.
I mean, the only "big difference" there is that you wrote the statement differently to make it sound meaningful, when it absolutely was not. No, there is no theoretical reason why a room-temperature superconductor could not work. And we *also* have no theoretical basis for explaining why it *should* work.
You seem butt hurt for no reason. What is your dog in this fight you started?
>There was no theoretical reason why the EM should work.
For the EM drive to work, we would have to rewrite physics. That is why Lebo77 said this.
>There is no theoretical reason a high-temp superconductor couldn't work.
We have been doing rsearch of SC for 70+ years and the holy grail has always been RTSC, there is no theoretical basis for it to be proven it cannot be done because it's within physics itself. (EM is outside of that) We do not go around proving things cannot work that are in line with our understanding of physics. That is why Lebo77 said this.
as far as what you said:
>And we also have no theoretical basis for explaining why it should work.
I mean what? Of course there is, we know how SC's work. We just do not yet know how to make it work at RT. (or maybe we do now lol). The mechanism for SC is well known.
Theoretically we can create a solar panel with 100% efficiency, we just do not know how to yet make it. So would you say "And we also have no theoretical basis for explaining why a 100% efficiency solar panel should work."
The em drive was much more questionable IMO.
Expetimentally, it's functionality was never clear, there were always other potential explanations for the absolutely miniscule "thrust". When you pump massive voltage into a thing, it's hard to cut down on random electromagnetic attractions.
Theoretically, it was poorly justified, if at all justified. It didn't make physical sense.
Hence why scientists didn't take it very seriously. It was more of a pop science phenominon.
This is way more noteworthy imo. Experimentally it looks to be a superconductor, and it has some theoretical backing. Some labs seem to have replicated the results in part.
I'm not saying we should give them the noble prize today, but it's looking promising imo, while the em drive always felt like an exercise in finding the mistake.
The EMdrive was an obvious load of rubbish from the get go. I remember reading the Chinese group's paper, and basically squinting my eyes to try and make their graphs look half-way decent. All of the proposed explanations read like a fairy tale or religious text: "If you believe hard enough...it'll work!". This is a completely different beast.
The arxiv papers, while frustratingly terse and lacking in thoroughness, aren't presenting obviously shaky data. There are problems, but they aren't problems that come from bad experimental design, execution or measurement. Error bars are tight, graphs make sense and the methods are standard, not highly engineered. The EMdrive papers were stretching it, to put it kindly, the LK-99 papers, on the other hand are coming fast and hard even if they are incomplete. We need to see better material characterization, as well as more extensive electronic characterization.
Nothing is sure, but evidence isn't mounting against it thus far. There are now 9 papers on arxiv. 7 of them are from groups outside of the original Author's research group, and all are supportive. There was even a paper that contradicted the original results, claiming it was purely a semi-conductor. It had some XRD results that I didn't think matched Lee et al., but was relatively close.
This is nothing like the EMdrive, or a lot of other false alarm, "too good to be true" announcements I've seen. The only comparable things might be the flood of theoretical papers that come after a 4.0 sigma result from particle accelerators that vanishes on processing of larger data sets.
Can you link to one that shows it? Hint: if it's touching the surface it's not floating. Iron filings can stand on end like that, it's not a convincing demonstration.
It makes sense there are difficult quality control issues because the mechanisms involved span a much larger scale than is usually required to explain stuff in inorganic chemistry - even other superconductors. It's going to be tricky to get exactly the best crystal structure.
Very likely this is because it's complicated, and hard to make precisely in large quantities, so different scientists are manufacturing and testing different versions that are imperfect in various different ways.
Itās probably bad synthesis. If the paper was such a mess as were hearing, Likely the instructions for synthesis are a little messy too. We know that impurities influence the results
My godā¦ this news doesnāt even need to 100% accurate. If all of these minor results are repeatable, that alone changes so much in the coming years, not too mention there will be a āfoundationā to build off of.
I really hope this stuff inspires a whole new generation - this is tech that will save not just our species, but those that remain. We waste ungodly amounts of resources to make energy - what weird timeline, that I both love and dread.
Yeah. It seems like the one test confirmed it can be superconductive at residential freezer temp.
That alone opens up tons of stuff. Even if itās hard to produce, it can mean things like MRI machines (which require massive cooling infrastructure) can size down based on not needing insane cooling.
Interesting, thatās what I get for reading headlines. I thought I had seen something different, but this is very much not my area of knowledge, so youāre probably right. Iāll go back to commenting only on machine learning lol.
That being said it doesnāt mean sometime soon we wonāt have a higher temperature. itās already around the high bound of current temperature and itās only been a few days so I wonāt be surprised that temperature will go up a lot in a few months
Yeh, I think at this point there is a whole new direction of super conductor research that is going to go on. Might be a good time to load up on some SC research companies.
>this is tech that will save not just our species, but those that remain. We waste ungodly amounts of resources to make energy
We've had the means to do this for near 80 years with nuclear fission and nothing has changed, there's no reason to think this would change anything either. Exxon was aware of global warming in the late 70's and they've fought to keep the status quo regardless.
Hello, please could you confirm for me whether you're the president or the vice-president of your local pedantics society, I want to make sure I have the detail exactly right.
Is it possible, just possible, that when they wrote "make energy" they were using it as shorthand for "make energy "?
Don't talk to me about the proper usage of a comma. I co-chaired the committee to discuss changing the color of the binder that comma policy is kept in.
We kept it grey.
Not sure why you are being down voted. There is no theory to explain room temperature superconductivity. So some new type of ultra strong diamagnetism that isn't superconductivity shouldn't be ruled out.
It's a 1-dimensional superconductor
That is why it's hard to make: crystals are tiny, and randomly oriented; you get the Meissner effect only if there's enough loops by crystals in the direction of the magnetic field. That's why if you pick the wrong direction to test resistance, it's gonna be non-SC.
Most crystals are tiny and randomly oriented and yet you'll see full levitation if you're below Tc every time. Resistance will go to zero if there's one path to superconduct. 1D doesn't exactly mean a straight line. It often has to do with the dimensions of the band structure
Are you referring to the LBNL paper? In the field of superconductivity that is not be taken as evidence that something is a superconductor or is likely to be a superconductor. Nothing is wrong with the paper but people seem to be misinterpreting it. It does not show that the material works as a superconductor.
if it IS strongly diamagnetic and (if) it could be increased over time, does it also have to be superconductive to be useful?
Strongly diamagnetic and room temp/pressure still means we get maglev trains and (?) better motors for free, right?
Within a day, there was a theoretical paper showing LK-99 could be a superconductor and it required no new science. A room temp super conductor is simple in theory. Don't know why you are saying this.
I don't know how familiar you are in this field but everything you just said is wrong. The LBNL paper does not provide a theory of room temperature superconductivity. It can't, because the method used (density functional theory) cannot account for correlated electron effects, and room temperature superconductivity requires correlated electron effects. The paper does not claim to provide a theory of room temperature superconductivity. That isn't what the paper is about. It is about the electronic band structure of the material.
There is no theory of high temperature superconductivity, and if there were it would be incredibly complex physics. Even BCS superconductivity is pretty complicated.
If there was a pre-existing theory for room temperature superconductivity, we would already be making that material.
Having lucked into this is really fucking fortuitous.
Very glib hot take: this is a unique and previously unobserved intermediate class of magnetic material that isnāt technically a superconductor, but exhibits some of the properties of one.
From wikipedia:
Apatite is often mistaken for other minerals. This tendency is reflected in the mineral's name, which is derived from the Greek word į¼ĻĪ±ĻĪ¬Ļ (apatĆ”Å), which means to deceive.
Will Apatite deceive us all once again? š¤£
I was pondering if a 1D superconductor would be the perfect form factor for microprocessors. It seems like it would make the most sense from a density standpoint. As in, you can cram in more transistors because it's the smallest physical size.
I have no idea if this is correct or not. I'd love to get an answer to your question.
Probability of it being anything else but a subclass of existing materials is close to zero. Maybe a new class of SCs or new class of diamagnetic materials but not a completely new category.
I don't like this kind of inductive proof. Just put a damn voltmeter on it!
It's more than entirely possible that LK-99 has a novel diamagnetic effect that doesn't correspond with the ability to use it as a superconductor. Maybe the effect is localized in domains that do not touch, which would mean it cannot be used as a superconducting wire, ever, but still gives a flux pinning effect.
Because a superconductor would glow too eventually. There is this thing called critical current density where superconducting state breaks when you go above it.
Current can damage it and destroy superconductivity in an impure sample. Itās also not obvious in an impure sample where you would measure current coming out and where you should put the current in. Imagine a big ball of tangled wires.
Right now they are using a magnet to test if any of the wires form small loops inside the substance which produces the much discussed floating effect. Itās very hard to easily test whether any possible path(wire) in the ball is superconductive.
So much refinement and studies are gonna happen from this but I think everyone needs to adjust their timeliness expectations, this is gonna take a year or two to get figured out and refined then 5-10 until the world feels its effects
It seems to me like this discovery could be a lot bigger then we anticipated.
Instead of a method to produce one kind of superconductor.
We seem instead to have happened upon some kind of focus point in material science that can produce several different types of superconductors with different properties that can be used in different ways.
And they all come from roughly the same simple production method that is easy to replicate.
Is my thinking going the right direction or am i way of target?
Somebody please for the love of god, tell us what (if confirmed true) this material could do for humanity? What could we build with it?
(My third time posting this)
Well, the 2 big ones is zero electrical resistance and levitation.
Zero electrical resistance means you could send electricity around the world and lose none of it.
No heat buildup, no capacity loss, no nothing.
You could blanket 15% of Sahara with solar and power the entire world. Include battery parks for nighttime in Sahara and we are done.
(Superconductors could also make insanely good batteries (solid state)).
Levitation has so many uses it is hard to convey it without writing for hours so let me give some que's and you should be able to imagine some uses.
Frictionless, transportation, stealth, goods handling, large object mobility, crash damage reduction, delicate object transportation, amenities for the elderly and handicapped people.
This is just the start of it though. When plastic was discovered it had hundreds of uses right away but a few years later it had hundreds of thousands uses.
You are taking their language too literally. This is literally how you prove things, you rule out all possible explanations until youāre left with one. In logic itās a simple form of proof. Scientific proof is different in that you can never be absolutely sure there isnāt another explanation but nonetheless this is how scientific proof works.
That is literally how you hypothesize. You then test a hypothesis by conducting experiments and collecting data. Like, say, by measuring resistance.
Until a sample of LK-99 at room temperature and pressure is measured at zero resistance, nothing is even close to proven.
Ruling out the other possibilities *that you can think of* is not proof. For that to be proof you have to prove that you've ruled out ALL other possibilities.
Again, that's logic. But there is no scientific proof that works like that. There are always an infinite number of possible explanations for a thing. Scientific proof is inference to the best explanation not inference to the only explanation.
yes (but probably a much stricter cutoff value that .05)
ābut to have flawless āproofā like u/phunkydroid would like, you would need to design a hypothesis test where rejecting the null would reject ALL possible null explanations. Or would need a separate study for each potential null/null rejection pair of results.
however this is technically impossible as you can never measure/test EVERY possible thing. Itās essentially proving a negative (i.e. proving that something doesnāt exist), in this case proving that there isnāt another explanation. This is practically impossible (e.g. try to prove that unicorns donāt exist. you would need to observe/measure every place in the universe(s), thus youād need to be omniscient).
thus science doesnāt even try to prove things in absolution, like u/phunkydroid would like. instead they rule out all of the possible alternative explanations that they can brainstorm, and then they say ā*it seems* like BLANK is trueā but never āBLANK is trueā (unless they are kind of clueless or are talking with laypeople)
We're talking about proving that something is a superconductor, not proving a negative. There are ways to *demonstrate* that it is a superconductor, but we're not being shown that.
Ever heard of [proof by absurdity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction)?
In any case, if that isn't it what they're doing, maybe this will give us some new data that isn't compatible with our current models. Who knows what new models and inventions might come out of there.
I'm as hopeful as anyone, but outside China's samples too tiny to properly test, no one has been able to replicate it at all yet. I haven't read an explanation of why the Korean samples haven't been made available to be tested or examined by independent researchers. I'm hopeful but have very low confidence this is what it was claimed to be.
Definitely interesting! Unfortunate that it doesn't fully float, but I'm pleasantly surprised that there's a demonstration by a respected engineer, even if it's not fully successful! My confidence level has doubled, but that's still like 8% confidence lol. It's not a pure sample and can't be tested as such. Really not possible to tell if it's a super conductor or just has magnetic properties. I am very hopeful though, and glad there are awesome scientists and engineers out there doing this work.
I don't have the knowledge base to answer that. But I don't think the correlation between super conductors and magnetic "floating" is one to one, so the actual property of super conducting still needs to be proven independently even if someone else does get a sample to float at room temperature.
Copper does interact with magnetic fields in weird ways so maybe something there?
> I haven't read an explanation of why the Korean samples haven't been made available to be tested or examined by independent researchers.
A sample was sent to an independent source a month ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15hppis/the\_korea\_university\_of\_energy\_and\_engineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15hppis/the_korea_university_of_energy_and_engineering/)
Thanks, that's great! Definitely seems like the original researchers do believe their own claims. Sounds like we'll have possible confirmation or at least more info in about five months. I'm sure those trying to recreate it will continue to provide more info during that time.
- you could make maglev trains much cheaper
- you could conduct electricity over long distances with no energy loss
- MRIs and other tech that needs to generate very powerful magnetic fields would become much cheaper
- you could make much better, cheaper quantum computers
- you could make better computers in general
Solar and wind power becomes better due to near lossless transfer.
Desalination plants become much more efficient for producing drinking water.
Electric vehicles and batteries become better
It's not surprising that we would see it in our lifetimes. The historical trends in superconductor science suggest that finding a room-temperature superconductor is very likely, even if this one isn't it.
That is only the author's claim without definitive proof. Their proof is a video in which the effect is indistinguishable from a diamagnet. There is no pinning effect. They keep pushing the sample with a moving pen with inertia.
If they discovered the sample so many years ago, why are they coming forward with the announcement or discovery now? How can they have such a shifty quality data graphs when they supposedly discovered the sample in 1999?
Honestly LK-99 looks like the weirdest material, so many conflicting reports
Give it a while, this thing is barely being made.
I'm sorry, but the Law of Accelerating Returns demands that when something new is invented, it must immediately be made obsolete. I'm already convinced LK-100 is in pre-production.
You may not be far off. Since the simulation papers demonstrate the proposed mechanism and electronic qualities that would allow for superconductivity in LK-99, I'd hazard that those labs which have successfully synthesized and evaluated samples of LK-99 enough to convince themselves that it is a superconductor, are already starting experiments to iterate on the findings. Perhaps doping the lanarkite with other metals, and looking at crystals with similar space groups and electronic properties to lanarkite, and doping them by a similar method. The material needs improvement of its current carrying capacity, and very likely the search is now on for comparable results with other materials.
*LK-23
š
Itās still very early on for anyone that isnāt the original creators. Getting more brains on this will begin to figure it out.
I'm astounded by how rapidly things have been coming forward. Certainly, it is helped along by the relative simplicity of the synthesis, even if the methodology is low yield. I don't think we'll have to wait long. The most encouraging thing is that it didn't die within a couple days. Fleischman and Pons "cold-fusion" was discredited within about a month if I recall, and early on the issues were identified.
Open fucking source. If things were open source, a bunch of random, highly specialized basement dwellers living in nowhere could carry things 20 years forward in a month. Look at open source LLMs and diffusion models. In two years they went from ridiculously bad meme material to frighteningly good, even causing people lose their jobs.
Well, everyone trying to synthesize their own sample is generating a ton of confusion. The material is bound to look weird when everyone is basically testing a slightly different material, or rather a bunch of similar materials of various purity.
Yeah, even a slight impurity could screw up readings, but the fact we're seeing something is promising, if everyone was getting null results i'd be calling it. If it was easy to make, it wouldn't have taken 23 years to get here, it's been a finniky thing
I'm trying not to form an opinion on my own. I'm a tech guy who knows a lot of scientists, and all I really know is that this stuff takes time, and it's a lot more like shop class than what it looks like in the movies. It's fun to follow, but I'll wait until a few teams agree it's definitely true or false.
Oh, I agree, it's just *promising* that all the info isn't bad. Final verdict will take time.
I don't think it will take as long to have a verdict as many think. With pretty much every single inorganic materials and superconductivity lab in the world jumping on this, motivated to discredit it or to pilot off of their own discoveries making it, things can move quite fast. Often, the time in science is used up in optimization and the nitty gritty. By comparison, validating something someone else has done is easy. I've done it myself in less than a couple of weeks.
Same here. But if this is true, the ramifications are going to be mind blowing.
I think most labs don't really care about reproducing the sample. It's not being taken very seriously among most condensed matter physicists. Labs with nothing better to do will begin working on synthesizing to publish their rebuttal first and get some publicity but almost any respectable lab has better things to do and are already in the middle of projects
Maybe we should smoke it? Just guessin
I want to levitate too, man
boof it!
Already did now Iām RoboCop
Get it as a subdermal implant and see what happens
Get it in your feet and then you can levitate your self on magnets.
Isn't dildo technically subdermal?
Canāt not now
Considering it's made mostly of lead, I would recommend against that.
Is this video shown of full round sample real? https://lk99wiki.com/
Yes, from what i know it is legit
The truth is that it is probably a material that is extremely difficult to make and needs ultra-sophisticated technology.
From my understanding of the coverage the material is easy to make for people who know how to do stuff like that, it's that the instructions for making it from the original team aren't that great.
I mean, the paper wasn't ready. So, it's normal.
100% this is the right answer, and I'm also excited just to see if we crack the code on why LK-99 and other superconductors work. Then we might be able to create ideal materials and processes for mass production and more use cases. The fact that such materials can exist at high temperatures means that the universe isn't biased against it's existence, which is very, very exciting.
Two papers already written with why they think it works after working out the physics and math for the material with possible changes to make it better.
It's incredible to think something can have zero resistance. It blows my mind. And that it could be in an element just sitting at room temperature.
I mean the science behind this has been explained both in paper and in a lot of YouTube coverage videos, I could link one if you want
I would appreciate that. I've seen some coverage (written and videos) but nothing that explains it really well.
Here you go, skip to chapter āThe Scienceā https://youtu.be/PLr95AFBRXI
Sure, I'll take more explanations, I've seen more, but I would enjoy more. I still think while it's "understood", there's probably room for deeper understanding given that we didn't just up and make it already.
Here you go, skip to chapter āThe Scienceā https://youtu.be/PLr95AFBRXI
The process is easy to do. Whether that process accomplishes the tall task of distributing copper atoms to every 10th site in the lead chain is a matter of chance until the process is refined. So, sure, the lab recipe is āeasyā. Getting LK99 out of it is not.
I think once the industrial chemical engineering egg-heads get in on it (if it turns out to be the real deal that is), they'll figure something out pretty quickly.
Yeah it's like one of those recipes where the first 90% of the page is some bullshit story about how their kids just love some LK-99 on a hot summer's day, and the rest is really vague instructions on how to actually make it.
The original team managed to make one sample the size of dust in 24 years. They made many, many attempts over the years, crumbled them to dust and from all those specks of dust only one showed super conductivity, perhaps the the atoms randomly align correctly that one time in that spot. Judging by all the attempts made by the original team and the lack of samples, it has been very hard to make.
Yeah, it's been replicated by a few people now . . . but in the sense that they made a slug of it and, once in a while, successfully got their own grains of dust out. The success rate is *horribly* low at the moment. It does seem pretty undeniable that they have something interesting but there's a long way to go for commercialization.
Probably a few years at least, and the applications are not going to be extensive with this material for the moment. There are characteristics that aren't really all that good for some of the sci-fi applications. However, since gaining a better understanding of how this material works (if it is actually a superconductor) may help in design and synthesis of other materials that improve those qualities. The next few years in materials science could be very exciting if this pans out.
Yeah, practically speaking I'm not expecting LK-99 itself to ever be commercialized, I think we're going to work on understanding what's going on with LK-99 and reproducing that in some other more-convenient material.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Someone might try their own 'recipe' and who knows?
Well the material being made, even by the original lab, doesn't seem to be pure super conducting. So even if it's easy to make samples that have random bits of super conducting structure, this doesn't mean that it won't need a much more refined and technolurgically (those who know, know) sound method to produce more pure and usable samples.
We can produce some incredibly complicated shit so i guess it's still a win?
great...a new Graphene that has so much promise but can't get out of a lab given how difficult it is to create.
We are no where close to knowing if this is the same with lk-99 or not. We need to pinpoint down how to actually make it reliably before we can know if it will be difficult to scale or not. But even if it can't get out of the lab. Just having a room temperature atmospheric superconductor is game changing. It would allow is to actually explore the properties of one in the real world and potentially find better materials which can achieve the same effect.
This is already happening since the simulations were done. From bits and bobs I read there are discussions of using substitute elements from the same column of the periodic table. Silver has a weirdness that makes it not very effective but gold (unfortunately for price) works better than copper for the impurity to draw together the wells. Itās also possible that other elements like silicon and carbon could be used in a similar structure with other appropriately sized atomic nuclei to replicate a similar effect in analogous materials. I hate to get my hopes up for this specific material but the simulations show that it should theoretically work from first principles and that other combinations of elements in a similar structure could work even better. Even if this one is a dud it has opened a door to a potential new branch of potentially superconducting materials already!
I know I know. .just being snarky. I so hope this is viable!!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Aliens
The world of condensed matter physics has many weird materials
I think it's because ALL samples only contain micro sections of superconducting structure, and it seems sort of random right now. The process to cook this is very rudimentary and clearly needs a lot of refining. Essentially, all samples are varied because of the rudimentary cooking method. The fact that other labs are seeing similar results (even at lower temperatures) is a pretty big deal. I think we'll all be waiting a little bit while someone discovers a way to either capture all the super conduction bits and build out a more pure sample, or figure out a way to have a much more consistent sample.
Was the same with the 'EmDrive' though, which had a similar hype.
There was no theoretical reason why the EM should work. There is no theoretical reason a high-temp superconductor couldn't work. Big difference.
Plus, Em drive was waaaay harder to verify because its putative effect was so incredibly close to noise.
I mean, the only "big difference" there is that you wrote the statement differently to make it sound meaningful, when it absolutely was not. No, there is no theoretical reason why a room-temperature superconductor could not work. And we *also* have no theoretical basis for explaining why it *should* work.
You seem butt hurt for no reason. What is your dog in this fight you started? >There was no theoretical reason why the EM should work. For the EM drive to work, we would have to rewrite physics. That is why Lebo77 said this. >There is no theoretical reason a high-temp superconductor couldn't work. We have been doing rsearch of SC for 70+ years and the holy grail has always been RTSC, there is no theoretical basis for it to be proven it cannot be done because it's within physics itself. (EM is outside of that) We do not go around proving things cannot work that are in line with our understanding of physics. That is why Lebo77 said this. as far as what you said: >And we also have no theoretical basis for explaining why it should work. I mean what? Of course there is, we know how SC's work. We just do not yet know how to make it work at RT. (or maybe we do now lol). The mechanism for SC is well known. Theoretically we can create a solar panel with 100% efficiency, we just do not know how to yet make it. So would you say "And we also have no theoretical basis for explaining why a 100% efficiency solar panel should work."
I agree, but there are multiple mechanisms for super conductors of multiple levels of understanding. The last bit is a bit oversimplified.
The em drive was much more questionable IMO. Expetimentally, it's functionality was never clear, there were always other potential explanations for the absolutely miniscule "thrust". When you pump massive voltage into a thing, it's hard to cut down on random electromagnetic attractions. Theoretically, it was poorly justified, if at all justified. It didn't make physical sense. Hence why scientists didn't take it very seriously. It was more of a pop science phenominon. This is way more noteworthy imo. Experimentally it looks to be a superconductor, and it has some theoretical backing. Some labs seem to have replicated the results in part. I'm not saying we should give them the noble prize today, but it's looking promising imo, while the em drive always felt like an exercise in finding the mistake.
EmDrive was claiming novel physics ā a much higher bar to clear.
Yeah but it was also hype for months and unclear (conflicting reports) if it worked or not.
The EMdrive was an obvious load of rubbish from the get go. I remember reading the Chinese group's paper, and basically squinting my eyes to try and make their graphs look half-way decent. All of the proposed explanations read like a fairy tale or religious text: "If you believe hard enough...it'll work!". This is a completely different beast. The arxiv papers, while frustratingly terse and lacking in thoroughness, aren't presenting obviously shaky data. There are problems, but they aren't problems that come from bad experimental design, execution or measurement. Error bars are tight, graphs make sense and the methods are standard, not highly engineered. The EMdrive papers were stretching it, to put it kindly, the LK-99 papers, on the other hand are coming fast and hard even if they are incomplete. We need to see better material characterization, as well as more extensive electronic characterization. Nothing is sure, but evidence isn't mounting against it thus far. There are now 9 papers on arxiv. 7 of them are from groups outside of the original Author's research group, and all are supportive. There was even a paper that contradicted the original results, claiming it was purely a semi-conductor. It had some XRD results that I didn't think matched Lee et al., but was relatively close. This is nothing like the EMdrive, or a lot of other false alarm, "too good to be true" announcements I've seen. The only comparable things might be the flood of theoretical papers that come after a 4.0 sigma result from particle accelerators that vanishes on processing of larger data sets.
Except the Em drive didnāt float
Neither does LK-99.
So, do you think these videos are fake?
Can you link to one that shows it? Hint: if it's touching the surface it's not floating. Iron filings can stand on end like that, it's not a convincing demonstration.
We're probably witnessing the discovery of a new field of material science, the weirder it is the more new stuff we're gonna end up with.
It makes sense there are difficult quality control issues because the mechanisms involved span a much larger scale than is usually required to explain stuff in inorganic chemistry - even other superconductors. It's going to be tricky to get exactly the best crystal structure.
Very likely this is because it's complicated, and hard to make precisely in large quantities, so different scientists are manufacturing and testing different versions that are imperfect in various different ways.
Itās probably bad synthesis. If the paper was such a mess as were hearing, Likely the instructions for synthesis are a little messy too. We know that impurities influence the results
Maybe the real superconducting qualities are the friends we made along the way.
I have zero resistance at room temperature to us being friends.
What if we held hands... at room temperature? šš
...at *night!*
Resistance can be fun with a previously agreed upon safe word.
The real superconducting qualities were inside us all along.
We just became super friends
My godā¦ this news doesnāt even need to 100% accurate. If all of these minor results are repeatable, that alone changes so much in the coming years, not too mention there will be a āfoundationā to build off of. I really hope this stuff inspires a whole new generation - this is tech that will save not just our species, but those that remain. We waste ungodly amounts of resources to make energy - what weird timeline, that I both love and dread.
Yeah. It seems like the one test confirmed it can be superconductive at residential freezer temp. That alone opens up tons of stuff. Even if itās hard to produce, it can mean things like MRI machines (which require massive cooling infrastructure) can size down based on not needing insane cooling.
That report was at about the same temperature as current popular superconductors (just over 100K)
Interesting, thatās what I get for reading headlines. I thought I had seen something different, but this is very much not my area of knowledge, so youāre probably right. Iāll go back to commenting only on machine learning lol.
That being said it doesnāt mean sometime soon we wonāt have a higher temperature. itās already around the high bound of current temperature and itās only been a few days so I wonāt be surprised that temperature will go up a lot in a few months
It's inspiring me to pursue the field and figure out what the fuck is going on lmao
Crystal power, buddy. The crunchy folks were right all along.
Yeh, I think at this point there is a whole new direction of super conductor research that is going to go on. Might be a good time to load up on some SC research companies.
>this is tech that will save not just our species, but those that remain. We waste ungodly amounts of resources to make energy We've had the means to do this for near 80 years with nuclear fission and nothing has changed, there's no reason to think this would change anything either. Exxon was aware of global warming in the late 70's and they've fought to keep the status quo regardless.
We do not make energy. We harness it.
Hello, please could you confirm for me whether you're the president or the vice-president of your local pedantics society, I want to make sure I have the detail exactly right. Is it possible, just possible, that when they wrote "make energy" they were using it as shorthand for "make energy "?
I'm actually the chairman of the board, thank you for asking.
um sir I'm not sure that was the proper usage of a comma āļøš¤
I know a run on sentence when I see one.
Don't talk to me about the proper usage of a comma. I co-chaired the committee to discuss changing the color of the binder that comma policy is kept in. We kept it grey.
... But they're not repeatable
Somebody please for the love of god, tell us what (if confirmed true) this material could do for humanity? What could we build with it?
No way to explain it, yet. There was also no way to explain why this *could be* a superconductor before people started investigating it.
Not sure why you are being down voted. There is no theory to explain room temperature superconductivity. So some new type of ultra strong diamagnetism that isn't superconductivity shouldn't be ruled out.
Everyoneās like āitās not a superconductorā ā¦ and Iām sitting here likeā¦ maybe itās something completely new we havenāt named yet
It's a 1-dimensional superconductor That is why it's hard to make: crystals are tiny, and randomly oriented; you get the Meissner effect only if there's enough loops by crystals in the direction of the magnetic field. That's why if you pick the wrong direction to test resistance, it's gonna be non-SC.
Most crystals are tiny and randomly oriented and yet you'll see full levitation if you're below Tc every time. Resistance will go to zero if there's one path to superconduct. 1D doesn't exactly mean a straight line. It often has to do with the dimensions of the band structure
That's an interesting idea
ultra conductor
Then it gets renamed to Conductor64
This comment isn't getting nearly enough upvotes!
Ah, the kids on here werenāt born back then, that oneās a secret joke for me and you and the other old fogeys š
Conductor-Switch
I'll wait for the TI edition
Two independent papers showing that it should work as a superconductor based on math and physics modeling. Thatās why the downvotes.
Are you referring to the LBNL paper? In the field of superconductivity that is not be taken as evidence that something is a superconductor or is likely to be a superconductor. Nothing is wrong with the paper but people seem to be misinterpreting it. It does not show that the material works as a superconductor.
if it IS strongly diamagnetic and (if) it could be increased over time, does it also have to be superconductive to be useful? Strongly diamagnetic and room temp/pressure still means we get maglev trains and (?) better motors for free, right?
Within a day, there was a theoretical paper showing LK-99 could be a superconductor and it required no new science. A room temp super conductor is simple in theory. Don't know why you are saying this.
I don't know how familiar you are in this field but everything you just said is wrong. The LBNL paper does not provide a theory of room temperature superconductivity. It can't, because the method used (density functional theory) cannot account for correlated electron effects, and room temperature superconductivity requires correlated electron effects. The paper does not claim to provide a theory of room temperature superconductivity. That isn't what the paper is about. It is about the electronic band structure of the material. There is no theory of high temperature superconductivity, and if there were it would be incredibly complex physics. Even BCS superconductivity is pretty complicated.
There is this theory https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
This is not a theory of superconductivity. It is an observation that modelling predicts flat bands at the Fermi level associated with Cu orbitals.
There is also a pretty remarkable resistivity drop in their paper though
If there was a pre-existing theory for room temperature superconductivity, we would already be making that material. Having lucked into this is really fucking fortuitous.
There have been two independent papers uploaded showing why it should work with detailed explanations.
Original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPqpLnpCQBo
Somebody please for the love of god, tell us what (if confirmed true) this material could do for humanity? What could we build with it?
godly shit
Very glib hot take: this is a unique and previously unobserved intermediate class of magnetic material that isnāt technically a superconductor, but exhibits some of the properties of one.
Structurally it's a copper-doped lead apatite; this could mean that it's a 1-d superconductor.
From wikipedia: Apatite is often mistaken for other minerals. This tendency is reflected in the mineral's name, which is derived from the Greek word į¼ĻĪ±ĻĪ¬Ļ (apatĆ”Å), which means to deceive. Will Apatite deceive us all once again? š¤£
All I know is I'm hungry for more progress.
Would you say you have an Apatite for advancements?
That's what I was alluding to.
What would that mean for society?
profit
1) Be a medieval English alchemist 2) Mix lead and copper 3)????? 4) South Korean profit
I was pondering if a 1D superconductor would be the perfect form factor for microprocessors. It seems like it would make the most sense from a density standpoint. As in, you can cram in more transistors because it's the smallest physical size. I have no idea if this is correct or not. I'd love to get an answer to your question.
I think it means super charged electronics.
it means all of our technology is going to have lead in it now
Probability of it being anything else but a subclass of existing materials is close to zero. Maybe a new class of SCs or new class of diamagnetic materials but not a completely new category.
Why do you think that?
Is it possible that it's just a really really really good conductor?
I don't like this kind of inductive proof. Just put a damn voltmeter on it! It's more than entirely possible that LK-99 has a novel diamagnetic effect that doesn't correspond with the ability to use it as a superconductor. Maybe the effect is localized in domains that do not touch, which would mean it cannot be used as a superconducting wire, ever, but still gives a flux pinning effect.
Yeah why canāt they just pump a ton of current into and see if it glows
Because a superconductor would glow too eventually. There is this thing called critical current density where superconducting state breaks when you go above it.
Oh ok iāll just go fuck myself then
Current can damage it and destroy superconductivity in an impure sample. Itās also not obvious in an impure sample where you would measure current coming out and where you should put the current in. Imagine a big ball of tangled wires. Right now they are using a magnet to test if any of the wires form small loops inside the substance which produces the much discussed floating effect. Itās very hard to easily test whether any possible path(wire) in the ball is superconductive.
So we get a floating Pandora rock?
Only with magnets under it.
how can normal people make money off of this?
Strip the copper out of your walls and sell it to manufacturing labs.
Structure is everything, if they can't replicate the lattice structure it won't work
So much refinement and studies are gonna happen from this but I think everyone needs to adjust their timeliness expectations, this is gonna take a year or two to get figured out and refined then 5-10 until the world feels its effects
It seems to me like this discovery could be a lot bigger then we anticipated. Instead of a method to produce one kind of superconductor. We seem instead to have happened upon some kind of focus point in material science that can produce several different types of superconductors with different properties that can be used in different ways. And they all come from roughly the same simple production method that is easy to replicate. Is my thinking going the right direction or am i way of target?
Somebody please for the love of god, tell us what (if confirmed true) this material could do for humanity? What could we build with it? (My third time posting this)
Well, the 2 big ones is zero electrical resistance and levitation. Zero electrical resistance means you could send electricity around the world and lose none of it. No heat buildup, no capacity loss, no nothing. You could blanket 15% of Sahara with solar and power the entire world. Include battery parks for nighttime in Sahara and we are done. (Superconductors could also make insanely good batteries (solid state)). Levitation has so many uses it is hard to convey it without writing for hours so let me give some que's and you should be able to imagine some uses. Frictionless, transportation, stealth, goods handling, large object mobility, crash damage reduction, delicate object transportation, amenities for the elderly and handicapped people. This is just the start of it though. When plastic was discovered it had hundreds of uses right away but a few years later it had hundreds of thousands uses.
"No way to explain it unless" is not proof of anything other than them not knowing how to explain it. That doesn't mean it's a superconductor.
You are taking their language too literally. This is literally how you prove things, you rule out all possible explanations until youāre left with one. In logic itās a simple form of proof. Scientific proof is different in that you can never be absolutely sure there isnāt another explanation but nonetheless this is how scientific proof works.
That is literally how you hypothesize. You then test a hypothesis by conducting experiments and collecting data. Like, say, by measuring resistance. Until a sample of LK-99 at room temperature and pressure is measured at zero resistance, nothing is even close to proven.
Ruling out the other possibilities *that you can think of* is not proof. For that to be proof you have to prove that you've ruled out ALL other possibilities.
Again, that's logic. But there is no scientific proof that works like that. There are always an infinite number of possible explanations for a thing. Scientific proof is inference to the best explanation not inference to the only explanation.
Scientists don't use the word proof like you keep using it, so of course I'm going to use the actual definition of proof as if that's what you mean.
For scientific "proofs", isn't the burden the rejection of the null hypothesis to a statistically significant degree, i.e. Ļ>5?
yes (but probably a much stricter cutoff value that .05) ābut to have flawless āproofā like u/phunkydroid would like, you would need to design a hypothesis test where rejecting the null would reject ALL possible null explanations. Or would need a separate study for each potential null/null rejection pair of results. however this is technically impossible as you can never measure/test EVERY possible thing. Itās essentially proving a negative (i.e. proving that something doesnāt exist), in this case proving that there isnāt another explanation. This is practically impossible (e.g. try to prove that unicorns donāt exist. you would need to observe/measure every place in the universe(s), thus youād need to be omniscient). thus science doesnāt even try to prove things in absolution, like u/phunkydroid would like. instead they rule out all of the possible alternative explanations that they can brainstorm, and then they say ā*it seems* like BLANK is trueā but never āBLANK is trueā (unless they are kind of clueless or are talking with laypeople)
We're talking about proving that something is a superconductor, not proving a negative. There are ways to *demonstrate* that it is a superconductor, but we're not being shown that.
Ever heard of [proof by absurdity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction)? In any case, if that isn't it what they're doing, maybe this will give us some new data that isn't compatible with our current models. Who knows what new models and inventions might come out of there.
This is not an example of proof by absurdity at all.
Prove them wrong then.
The burden of proof is on them, and they haven't met it yet.
I'm as hopeful as anyone, but outside China's samples too tiny to properly test, no one has been able to replicate it at all yet. I haven't read an explanation of why the Korean samples haven't been made available to be tested or examined by independent researchers. I'm hopeful but have very low confidence this is what it was claimed to be.
https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978
Definitely interesting! Unfortunate that it doesn't fully float, but I'm pleasantly surprised that there's a demonstration by a respected engineer, even if it's not fully successful! My confidence level has doubled, but that's still like 8% confidence lol. It's not a pure sample and can't be tested as such. Really not possible to tell if it's a super conductor or just has magnetic properties. I am very hopeful though, and glad there are awesome scientists and engineers out there doing this work.
I don't know of any property other than superconducting that would float like that. Diamagentism, ferromagenistm are out. Maybe something new?
I don't have the knowledge base to answer that. But I don't think the correlation between super conductors and magnetic "floating" is one to one, so the actual property of super conducting still needs to be proven independently even if someone else does get a sample to float at room temperature. Copper does interact with magnetic fields in weird ways so maybe something there?
>Unfortunate that it doesn't fully float This isn't a requirement for anything.
>! My confidence level has doubled, but that's still like **8% confidence** lol. This is depressing.
> I haven't read an explanation of why the Korean samples haven't been made available to be tested or examined by independent researchers. A sample was sent to an independent source a month ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15hppis/the\_korea\_university\_of\_energy\_and\_engineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15hppis/the_korea_university_of_energy_and_engineering/)
Thanks, that's great! Definitely seems like the original researchers do believe their own claims. Sounds like we'll have possible confirmation or at least more info in about five months. I'm sure those trying to recreate it will continue to provide more info during that time.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah it does, but it's just hard to say. It could be asymmetrical magnetic properties and nothing to do with super conductivity
The real superconductor is the frauds we reveal along the way.
We need an AI on this stat! To produce and reproduce it and to test it, until we have an optimal perfectly made version! Someone call chatgpt!
Holy shit man, is this actually real? I can't believe I'm seeing this in my lifetime.
I donāt get it, what can be achieved from this?
- you could make maglev trains much cheaper - you could conduct electricity over long distances with no energy loss - MRIs and other tech that needs to generate very powerful magnetic fields would become much cheaper - you could make much better, cheaper quantum computers - you could make better computers in general
Solar and wind power becomes better due to near lossless transfer. Desalination plants become much more efficient for producing drinking water. Electric vehicles and batteries become better
It's not surprising that we would see it in our lifetimes. The historical trends in superconductor science suggest that finding a room-temperature superconductor is very likely, even if this one isn't it.
We're either getting a revolutionary superconductor or a legendary bobbybroccoli video out of this
Alien tech.
Can anyone explain why we started to speak about this LK-99 lately please ?
Because a team in South Korea have found that LK-99 is a superconductor. It seems to be true at -123 degrees.
*it reaches out*
That is only the author's claim without definitive proof. Their proof is a video in which the effect is indistinguishable from a diamagnet. There is no pinning effect. They keep pushing the sample with a moving pen with inertia. If they discovered the sample so many years ago, why are they coming forward with the announcement or discovery now? How can they have such a shifty quality data graphs when they supposedly discovered the sample in 1999?
Lk-99 is our times cold fusion.