Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all' Enthusiasm over the purported room temperature superconductor LK-99 is waning further as more research teams are unable to reproduce the original findings. In fact, one at a US university has concluded it is not a superconductor at all. Researchers around the world are racing to reproduce the findings from the Quantum Energy …
I’m wondering if anyone has read the original patent thesis. It’s from the original patent thesis.
You can find the images (Fig. 21, 22) https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537A1/en
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FIG. 21 shows that when no current is supplied to the LK-99 sample, the diamagnetic property is very small, so the magnetic levitation phenomenon is not good, and it is just placed on the magnet. FIG. 22 is a Cooper pair generated and increased by the supplied current As a result, it can be seen that the diamagnetic property is strengthened and the magnetic levitation phenomenon appears.
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Doesn’t this mean you can control superconductivity?
"Is this one of those "that's very odd" moments?"
I think the original experiment was one of those moments.
The batch of follow up results is one of those moments where you say: "Oh, never mind... there was a problem with the experiment*. Hopefully we learned some things about the possible sources of error in this field of work. In the meantime, hooray for Science and the process of publishing our work so that others may validate, learn from, and expand upon our findings."
* or there was outright fraud, which is particularly foolish in a case where the experiment is easily repeatable by a competent lab.
Doesn’t this mean you can control superconductivity?
No. It shows that an electric current has an associated magnetic field. (Exactly how that magnetic field interacts with whatever magnetism the sample has, might have some interesting science, but it's just normal old electromagnetism).
However, we can already control superconductivity. Heat up a superconductor above it's critical temperature and it will cease to superconduct, and vice versa.
I wonder what pushed those guys at the Quantum Energy Research Centre in Seoul to publish something that wrong.
Is this a case of they were genuinely convinced their data was good and made a mistake, or is it that they just wanted their names in the papers ?
Because they had to know that such a claim would be verified, and after the cold fusion scandal, there is no chance that they could just do a "you're trying it wrong" and get away with it.
Now they're not supplying the samples they promised. Another bad mark on this so-called research center.
I don't know if they're ever going to "find" anything or anything else, but if they do, they'd better find somebody else's name to put on the paper, because theirs is burned for all eternity (well, at least until the Internet dies).
> stocks in companies linked to superconductor technology have dropped, according to Bloomberg, after taking off following the publication of the original report in July.
1) Invest in "companies linked to superconductor technology"
2) Publish paper about superconductor technology
3) Sell shares before they drop
That's next year's research budget taken care of.
My concern is the fickleness of the stock market in the first place. Why invest in some random superconductor company that is totally unrelated to this research paper when said company may never get access to the technology even if it does exist? A major breakthrough such as this purported to be is as likely to wipe out many "superconductor companies" as be a sign they will suddenly thrive and become valuable.
This has happened before several times, but this *REALLY* seemed to gain a huge amount of traction on social media and news outlets, much more than anything else I can remember off the top of my head.
This makes the disappointment even greater when it's eventually debunked, alas, there at least appears to have been another successful fusion experiment - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2386288-nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-is-cheap-clean-energy-finally-here/ (Looks like paywall, but it's not!)
Gave us all a bit of hope for a while though I guess :-)
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