The claim: Room temp (~300K) superconductor exists and we got it!
The replication attempts: The production method is so poorly documented only a fraction of the samples being made shows any interesting properties. And among those interesting ones, results varies. Very few, if any, attempt actually completely shows the entire spectrum of properties and behaviors of a true superconductor at room temperature yet. But those kinds of experiments take time so it isn't an indicator of problem.
My take: It is probably something interesting but not well understood. Best case scenario, the original sample in the Korean lab probably won the synthesis lottery and is actually a true room temp superconductor. Worst case scenario, we got another class of high temp (warmer than liquid nitrogen but cold enough that applications are limited) superconductor but nothing revolutionary since at this point, it is pretty conclusive that there is something interesting with LK-99.
> Worst case scenario, we got another class of high temp (warmer than liquid nitrogen but cold enough that applications are limited) superconductor but nothing revolutionary since at this point, it is pretty conclusive that there is something interesting with LK-99.
I don't think that's the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that there is actually nothing interesting with LK-99, and everything we've seen that suggests otherwise is experimenter bias heaped on top of experimental error. I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
There's plenty of people that are skeptical and making it a point to tell everyone they are skeptical. There's plenty of people that are skeptical that are still engaging on the possibility of it being real because it is interesting to do so. There are plenty of people discussing potential pitfalls in the papers being written and experiments being done.
But ultimately talking to people in the comments on HN is a form of entertainment for most of the people engaging, and skepticism is a lot less entertaining for most people in general than being enthusiastic and engaging on possibilities. It's not surprising that people going somewhere for engagement and entertainment are doing the thing that is more fun to the majority.
I doubt the majority of people that are excited about it would place serious money on it being true - I sure wouldn't. But I am having fun watching the developments, talking about things to the minimal extent I understand, and thinking about the Cool Stuff that would become possible if we were to suddenly have a new room temp ambient pressure semiconductor
This. The idea that science can't also be fun seems to be the mindset of a lot of people criticizing others for participating more as eager spectators. Nothing wrong with that. Let people enjoy things. If LK-99 turns out to be nothing then we got some entertainment out of it and a lot of people learned about superconductors
(and science in general) in the process. How's that not a win in and of itself?
I'm guessing some people feel like the time spent discussing/keeping up to date would be a waste of time if it turns out it isn't true.
Which I guess is fine, the friction comes from when those people think others shouldn't "risk" wasting their time, as they start wanting to impose their own will upon others. But this happens all the time with humans so...
Cold fusion was replicated by a few labs but that wasn’t good enough for the media and they killed it. For background see 60 minutes episode “Cold Fusion is Hot again” where they interview and admit Pons Fleischmann was right.
The difference now is that China is a super power and doesn’t have to kiss the ring of the US hegemon.
Journal seems legitimate, but author has a H-index of 7 and is making a revolutionary claim that the vast majority of working scientists in the field reject. Why aren't people accepting his work, then? Who is perpetrating this "hoax" you are referencing?
Okay, so if this global conspiracy is about maintaining control of the world through the supply of oil, thus they are suppressing cold fusion, why have they allowed solar power and wind power to exist? Or battery storage technology, or electric cars?
Not comparing here, but I just remembered that the first paper on graphene was rejected (twice) and one of the reviewers said something like 'this paper does not represent a scientific advance.'
No, it's not. Most people engaging in scientific papers are not themselves scientists in the field. Further, their enthusiasm doesn't change reality. LK-99 is or is not a superconductor. People getting overly excited doesn't change that. Lighten up.
Just because you are not a scientist in the field does not mean you cannot engage and improve your critical thinking skills. I do not need to lighten up, you need to learn some intellectual rigor.
Ha, I've been talking about the same topic with an experimental physics professor friend of mine. He was just not interested at all, like "I've seen stuff like that so many times before, I'm not interested at this point. I may look at it when there's a publication in a serious journal." while I was like "Hey it's popcorn time, this is a fun ride, whatever the outcome!". =)
Speaking as an academic, I really hope they don't ever publish in a serious journal even if it turns out to replicate. Did your friend take Ranga Dias seriously because that was published in Nature? I understand there's a lot of noise, but one of the things one learns is to cut out noise without having to rely on journal brand
Do you even do proofs in your line of work? I'm saying making publication necessary for arousal is a foolproof way to miss out on the beginnings of most of the really interesting stuff. Yeah he can read the ivy-approved materials in nature, but that would be stale. Okay, I can understand that his own line of work is much more interesting to him, that he would ignore the latest glimmerings from adjacent fields. That makes more sense than just taking peer review at face value.
Several years ago there was publicized a P = NP proof, and during our group meeting I couldn't help but audibly scoff, but our advisor just calmly downloaded the pdf and started skimming it.
It was an object lesson for me. Keep an open mind, use your own competence and intellectual abilities to see for yourself and decide. And only then can you offer insightful criticism.
There’s plenty of skepticism. It’s the zero-cost position here. But there are good and bad skeptical positions. The good one involves people attempting to replicate and publishing results whether positive, negative or somewhere in between. The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
If there’s a real problem, it’s that we have still not made publication of negative results sufficiently attractive. That’s still a problem throughout science and one we desperately need to address since it is what would let us think more clearly in situations like this.
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
You put it perfectly. I'm mostly skeptical and very guardedly optimistic because something seems to be happening. But I've very carefully marked each and every one of my comments with 'assuming this is true' or 'if this is true' to avoid the impression that I'm already convinced. I'm not. But I'm on the side of everybody getting their hands and their lab gear dirty: they are the ones doing the work and they are the ones who put their time (and sometimes their reputations) on the line. That starts off with the original Korean team but also goes for everybody else that has rolled up their sleeves and gone to work. Those people have an audience now, thanks to all these connected media and it's great to see the scientific process acting out in the open for a change where everybody gets to see how the sausage is made.
Meanwhile the Debbie Downers have probably never seen the insides of a lab and have never made anything, they're just taking the default position because it doesn't require any work at all and has the highest likelihood of being true. But I very quietly hope that they're wrong and I also hope that if they are wrong that they will own it. Unqualified negativity is just as dumb as unqualified positivity, it just looks smarter, but it isn't a sign of intelligence.
I think the unqualified negativitiy is based on a common misunderstanding of the scientific process, that if one finds any shortcoming in a result--be it applied or theoretical--one can throw the entire work in the trash under the pretense of falsification.
But this is wrong. Science is about weighing the totality of evidence, and refining that evidence in one direction or another over many iterations.
Indeed, lots of progress was salvaged from failed attempts. In a way all of science is a continuous refinement of our model of how things really work by finding how it definitely doesn't work.
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
I refer to these folks as the "boring universe brigade." The heuristic seems to be that if it's in any way exciting it's probably bullshit. It's a blind overreaction to memetically-optimized pseudoscience.
Isn’t it just a reasonable application of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”?
And I say this as someone really hoping that this is true, since I assume this would be great news for renewable energy (and we really need great news on that front)
pg: "Being too cynical will cause you to miss out on the most important phase changes."
Defaulting to "no" might get you the right answer the majority of the time, but it also makes you miss the times that "yes" is correct. And correct things that are a radical departure from the status quo are probably the most important and useful to get right.
Skepticism is good (it's still ambiguous whether LK-99 is anything at all), but pessimistic cynicism is not the same thing.
The brain loves an excuse to apply a noise cutting heuristic. There was an article a while back about that being a problem for general physicians, where the problem is usually simple, but very very rarely something serious. A doctor can appear good when they get it right 99% of the time, but they might achieve that by defaulting to “you’re fine, here’s some (ibuprofen/antibiotic/antihistamine/etc)”. Thus, their actual job is to identify that 1% with reasonable accuracy.
Personally, I think we are past the point of this being nothing. There have been multiple confirmations of at least something unexplained going on. Maybe all of them are wrong but honestly, that is more of an extraordinary claim than saying this is something interesting, just not a full on room temp superconductor.
When people rush to replicate an experiment, everybody with a positive result has something to publish very quickly, and everybody with a negative result need a lot more time to be certain of it.
The kinds of results we are seeing are very hard to get by chance or due to bad experimental setup. But as a rule, we can't really differentiate a real thing from random noise in as little time as have passed.
How is that possibly true? LK-99 is already amongst the highest-temperature superconductors ever found (with that claim substantiated by at least two independent research teams as of this moment).
But, for what it's worth, as both an LK-99 optimist and as someone who has worked in the field and who still talks to people in it, most people in it seem to put the chances well below 50%.
If you push it, all the diamagnetism videos people published about reproducing it could be created by some weird and unlikely distribution of ferromagnetism on the sample. Except for the one that nobody knows where it comes from, that could easily be a fabrication.
That leaves the original, that is clearly diamagnetism, but still could be misleading in many ways.
We don't know how many labs are working on replicating this. So we have no idea how unlikely mistakes we should expect to see.
But that people have a positive result at all to publish is extraordinary. If this isn't a super conductor at this point that is probably even bigger than a superconductor - it means there is other physics we are not aware of to investigate.
At this point I've changed to this is probably true, but I don't know how big it is. (if it is true but impossible to produce at industrial scale it is not revolutionary)
I understand why a lot of people think this, but I don't think we can say that with confidence yet. Cold fusion "replicated successfully" multiple times in the 80s too.
Unfortunately, we live in the age of TikTok. Videos on their own bring no more credibility than written text; they no longer evince a substantively greater investment of resources. I'm more inclined toward the cheerleading section of the LK-99 audience, but watching the videos I realized now is a perfect opportunity to apply recalibrated B.S. detectors.
This doesnt pass the smell test. Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos? What’s the conspiracy here? There is no upside, we will know in a couple of weeks if it’s real or not.
I didn't mean to insinuate that anybody faked anything. Just that video evidence on its own isn't per se any more credible than if they unambiguously made the same claim in writing. The technology for making fake or misleading videos is easy to come by, so why mentally lean on the fact that they were videos at all? Our answers wrt likelihood of truthfulness simply lie in provenance and other indicia of credibility that would be shared with claims in any other trivially falsified medium, like writing. Why, indeed, would multiple seemingly non-cooperating supposed researchers make the set of claims that have been made?
I don't think anything was faked, nor did I think anything was faked before videos began appearing. But that's precisely why this is an opportune time to exercise recalibrated judgment in not allowing the videographic character to inflate my cautious enthusiasm.
If it takes X weeks to do research and someone publishes results before that time, then the conclusion that the results are suspect is warranted and is in no way a conspiracy theory.
Thats because Cold Fusion does work, its just useless. It loses energy.
You need Muons, a negatively charged particle that is 200 times heavier than an electron. They replace electron in the atom. Two Muon-replaced atoms of hydrogen can fuse at room temperature.
The problem is that muons a very expensive to produce and decay quickly. So you spend more energy producing muons than you get from fusion.
Wasn't the problem with Cold Fusion that it did NOT replicate, and thus got sullied with a bad reputation, so nobody wanted to touch it.
Then decades later, it's still kind of open question. Aren't there some studies still going on, more on the down-low since it has such a bad reputation. Kind of like the super-conductor, have to keep it quiet and make really sure before publishing.
Some stuff replicated. It was clearly not cold fusion.
Some people made a career studying the kinds of sonoluminescence needed to explain what that experiment saw. (And AFAIK, nobody found a use for the theory yet.)
The big difference is that standard theoretical techniques have indicated the compound to be promising from an electronic structure point of view and confirmed that it would be tricky to synthesize just right.
Cold fusion always was dependent on new physics to be discovered
In the cold fusion experiments, they were measuring an exess of heat. That's very difficult to measure, and some noise or experimental error can confuse the people.
No one measured a huge flow of neutrons, that were expected to be generated by the fusion and are more easy to distingish from noise.
Reading this paper they’re pretty restrained. They got zero resistance but didn’t get everything they were looking for.
This material is fascinating and I love the interest and good debate it’s generating.
Sometimes it feels like we missed so many golden ages but we might still get to experience something world changing before our eyes and understand what it means.
Real technological progress and societal improvement breed optimism. This could be the start of something big. Even if it isn’t it reminds us why we are still searching for theorised technologies.
You're right that this is the worst case scenario, but each interesting replication or semi-replication, even sloppy replication, or theoretical model erodes at that.
Being perma-skeptic is as bad as being a perma-fanboy
Anyways your memory is really short. Don't you remember how when it first came out (not even a week ago) everyone was hollering that it was fake?
Inb4 "extraordinary claims...": there is no fundamental reason for superconductivity in general to be impossible at RT.
> You're right that this is the worst case scenario, but each interesting replication or semi-replication, even sloppy replication, or theoretical model erodes at that.
Not really. The ur-example of the worst-case scenario is cold fusion, and as we were reminded by somebody [1] early on, is that the first replications of the Fleischmann–Pons experiment were actually successful to some degree. Those initial replications were later retracted when it was found that there was experimental error that could observe the same phenomenon, and other replication attempts were reporting outright failure instead of partial success.
> Anyways your memory is really short. Don't you remember how when it first came out (not even a week ago) everyone was hollering that it was fake?
Your memory is really short. The first thread was 8 days ago [2], over a week ago. I've just been perusing those comments quickly, and there's very few accusations of it being fake. The dominant sentiment is along the lines of "big, if true" or "please let it be true", and there's only a few top-level comments casting any shade on its plausibility. But the threads since the weekend have largely seemed to cast aside even the limited skepticism once opined.
[1] I'd love to credit them, but sorry, trying to dig out which comment out of several hundred splayed out across the various early threads was the one I remembered is more work than I can devote at the time. Edit: credit is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36884183, thanks to segfaultbuserr for finding the link.
> I'd love to credit them, but sorry, trying to dig out which comment out of several hundred splayed out across the various early threads was the one I remembered is more work than I can devote at the time.
It was posted by curiousObject at [1]. I upvoted that thread and participated in that discussion (including adding extra information on why cold fusion experiments were inherently problematic), so I have the link.
As the submitter of the current paper, I'm cautiously optimistic based on the recent theoretical and experimental results. But I strongly agree with you that a repetition of cold fusion's initial false-positive replication "success" is a real risk.
Fortunately, observing a levitating fleck of diamagnetic material is far less error prone than measuring heat or neutrons in a messy cold fusion experiment.
> Being perma-skeptic is as bad as being a perma-fanboy
Not really?
Perma-skeptic will be far more accurate than perma-fanboy.
Depends on context but for example believing every get-rich-quick scheme will get you robbed by scammers, while perma-skeptic will miss very occasional actual opportunity.
Obviously catching and exploiting great opportunities would be even better, but of these two perma-skeptic is better.
> Perma-skeptic will be far more accurate than perma-fanboy.
That's not accuracy, that's statistics. Once you bias for the expected outcome the perma skeptic will be just as often wrong or right as the perma optimist. They have no information about the thing they are talking about, they only have information about that expected outcome based on previous observations. If they had information about the thing itself they wouldn't be wrong for those things that turn out to be true (but then, I guess they wouldn't be perma skeptics to begin with). So, a perma skeptic misses all of the real stuff and a perma optimist misses all of the bad stuff. Neither shows intelligence.
I read through this thread and I can't help to feel reminded of the discussion about cryptocurrencies. So many people that want to believe, rational people that try to explain why it has to work when there is just not enough information right now. As if we believing it will change the outcome of the replication everybody that doesn't believe is shunned and called a heretic. Suddenly people that studied social sciences try to explain to me (a certified electrical engineer) why this is a big deal, because they saw a few videos on youtube about it, with theories of how this solves all energy problems that are so far removed from practical reality that this can only become a let-down.
Note: I am cautiously optimistic myself, but damn, just wait and don't overhype it.
> I read through this thread and I can't help to feel reminded of the discussion about cryptocurrencies.
Same. Some people are simply wired to be perma-skeptics / perma-bears / perma-negative. This community is still full of people who truly don’t grasp how world changing bitcoin is. They are in complete denial, most often parroting unoriginal talking points that they’ve been handed from others.
It’s easier to bypass deep thinking and deep learning and just imitate being an expert. It takes courage to admit being ignorant.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in superconductors. I doubt most people in this thread are. But they are parroting and making ignorant predictions - just like crypto.
I'll not take a personal stance on crypto in this comment, but it's really a stretch to try and compare the two.
No one debates that there are significant and important uses for RTAPS. Lots of people debate if there are significant and important uses for cryptocurrency.
As I said I feel reminded of the discussions, I did not compare this scientific finding to crypto-assets per se. What I did however compare is the way this finding is being discussed in comparison to how crypto-assets have been discussed at a certain point in time.
More specifically I was comparing a specific trait of some actors in both of these discussions (the "I want to believe"-type). I stand behind that observation, although I see how people can read more into my comment, depending on where they are coming from.
You mean cryptography? Yeah, thanks to let's encrypt we are now reaching widespread adoption of TLS. You barely see any http websites anymore thanks to that.
Cryptocurrencies on the other hand don’t seem to be doing all thar well. Their hype-phase is definitely over and not many actually useful use cases remained.
The reason I don't think this is the case is that they have literally been working on this thing for a quarter of a century. While the people involved are not full on superconductor experts, they are also not super stupid and realize that their claim is a huge one.
How could you work on something for years and years and years, make a claim that it is the first room temperature SC and be _totally_ wrong about it. Even if they only worked on it for ten years, I don't think they are totally wrong.
I think what has happened is that they rushed to publish the paper and the reason it has not been replicated is that they don't even know how to reliably make the material yet. This is why the methods to make it are not in the paper -- because they don't even know how to do it.
Remember they were forced to publish this paper by a rogue former employee.
While I have no expertise in material science, it is definitely not some minecraft crafting - depending on the procedure, you may get only few percents of useful output that you may have no way to further purify.
At least for chemistry, it is often a completely different paper that introduces an efficient way for actually mass-producing the given chemical. The first one is more like a proof of concept throwaway code, if we want an analogy.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
You're not seeing them because every thread with a significant percentage of sceptical voices trips the HN flamewar detector, which goes off when there are more comments than upvotes.
I've counted three threads where this happened. It's the reason why the front page wasn't plastered with LK-99 news.
Wouldnt a emotional keyword filter make for better statistical flamewar detection? Also, i guess length of comment might be a strong indicator of thread degeneration.
Finally you could create fields of expertease for every account (upvoted comments keywords) and ban threads with non-experts majority commenting.
> Wouldn't a emotional keyword filter make for better statistical flamewar detection?
Something like http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html but fine tuned to flamewars? Perhaps. The mods have some easy automatic criteria, the flags, vouches and upvotes from users, and then apply manual moderation on top of that.
It may be hard to distinguish a good discussion about a war from a bad discussion about icecream. Or replace war and icecream with your favorite topics.
> Also, i guess length of comment might be a strong indicator of thread degeneration.
I like that. Very short comments are usually bad, but huge wall of text too. Perhaps they have something more advanced and never told us. It may be part of the secret sauce. (Or it may be good that they pretend they have advanced stuff, so people behave better.)
> Finally you could create fields of expertise for every account (upvoted comments keywords) and ban threads with non-experts majority commenting.
It's an interesting idea, but my guess is that it's too hard. I'm not sure which tags apply to me. In some topics I'm mathematician, but I comment a lot in physics stuff because I have an unfinished degree in physics. But it depend on the area. In some areas I know a lot and in others I can just skim the article and look at the graphics. [1]
My guess is that non-experts are always the majority. For me the important part is that the comments by experts float near the top. There are also some interesting comments from non-experts, sometimes with a good reply from an expert. Upvoting good comments is very important to make the discusion better.
[1] Protip: Reading medicine studies, remember to Ctr+F "exclusion", because sometimes after the study started they excluded some of the subjects, like the guy that had 100% success after excluding the 1 dead and 5 other weird cases.
It's good to keep an open mind both ways, but "skepticism" without either interesting or convincing arguments is IMO just as useless.
We all know there is a good chance it turns out to be a dud. We all know cold fusion/emdrive/superluminal experiments turned out to be duds. We all know this.
I wonder what news do "skeptics" have to bring to the table. Nothing a skeptic has to say changes anything. We are all - except for the handful of actual experts here - amateurs at best, but probably ignorant peasants. Just about anything we have to say about it is just noise. I'd favor the positive noise, but that's just me.
Imagine being at a football game: "This game could easily be lost! Ah, see, another pass failed. Don't get your hopes up! Please don't cheer, please wait until the very last moment and then wait another hour to have administrative confirmation. Then wait two weeks. Then you may cheer, but only modestly."
> It's good to keep an open mind both ways, but "skepticism" without either interesting or convincing arguments is IMO just as useless.
skepticism is an useful filter
> I wonder what news do "skeptics" have to bring to the table.
reminder of "We all know there is a good chance it turns out to be a dud. We all know cold fusion/emdrive/superluminal experiments turned out to be duds. We all know this."
I actually think far more people know this than done; it wouldn't surprise me if it truly is practically "everyone" on Hacker News.
But what is the expectation here? Must every comment thinking about the possibilities or being excited by incremental evidence of support be prefaced with a note of skepticism? Must we engage in such ritualistic behavior in order to be seen as anything other than hopeless scientific romantics? I must pour a bucket of cold water on my own head before feeling even an ounce of optimism? Optimism carries the possible - even likely - cost of disappointment, and in the wrong company can create the same in others. Pessimism is beneficial, but it doesn't have to be worn on one's sleeve at all times lest it sap joy and color from the world. This is a community of enthusiasts, we can be enthusiastic without also being hopeless idiots lurching from one false discovery to the next.
Thank god for the skeptics. I might have gotten enthused about something. Can you imagine the implications of that? My god, please tell me someone is going to stop me from being mildly entertained before it gets out of hand.
Agents of reason, please enlighten us with your eternal negativity so that we may perceive clearly the folly of our excited ways.
> The worst case scenario is that there is actually nothing interesting with LK-99, and everything we've seen that suggests otherwise is experimenter bias heaped on top of experimental error.
well while we're one-upping each other I'm pretty sure the worst case scenario is some lk99 synthesizer actually creates a black hole which gobbles up the planet.
What if thats where all black holes come from and thats why we haven’t found any aliens? Just a misfortune reality that “accidental blackhole” is lower on the tech tree than fast space travel.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
HN is supposed to have a high signal-to-noise for comments. I'm skeptical about this. I think it's the modern Pons + Fleishmann, but I won't post that on every thread because it contributes nothing. There's more insightful, and interesting comments about chemistry than anything I can write that would add to the discussion.
I think it comes down to a lack of knowledge. I was pretty skeptical of the original claim, since RT has been a goal for a long time and no one has achieved it . So far all the repro attempts I have seen mention temps around 100K. I don't follow SC so 100k sounds "really cold" to me. It matches with my shallow understanding of SC "it is really cold". Maybe that is really warm in SC land. Either way there hasn't been a near freezing repro so I have grown more skeptical of the original claim.
100K is very cold. But if this result pans out, it's a very good thing for the possibility that LK99 really is an RTAPS.
There are a lot of explanations as to why they might not see bulk superconductivity at room temp - impurities in the sample (or the impurities being the SC) being the big one.
If LK99 is a superconductor at all, but not a RTAPS, it would be quite strange for the South Korean team to have made a mistake. It's quite difficult to accidentally cool something down to 100K, and if they were just getting false positives on their testing for superconductivity, it would be a massive coincidence that it happened to actually be one at 100K.
We're also seeing a lot of videos that show strong diamagnetism - this doesn't mean it's a superconductor, but all superconductors are perfect diamagnets. We have some unverified videos that seem to show things beyond just diamagnetism, with the material being stable in suspension over a single magnet, which a regular diamagnetic material cannot do. These pieces of material are too small to have been cooled down to 100K and stay there for the duration shown, as well as no frost appearing, etc., which would be quite difficult at that temperature in an environment with any humidity.
I think the bigger concern is around whether or not this is a valid result at all - the Real Deal scientists discussing it seem to have mixed thoughts there, particularly around the noise floor of the instrumentation equipment, etc. Some say that that doesn't matter, others say that it does, particularly since we don't see the kind of on/off drop you would in other superconductors, etc.
At worst, this replication attempt's result is from a misunderstanding of how their equipment works in this condition. At best it provides evidence in favor of LK99 being an RTAPS.
I'd go one step further. The worst case is they made up data enough to seem plausible, knowing full well replication is impossible, but their institution wanted their name in a major publication so they were told to make shit up and get published.
While the production method of the original Korean authors is poorly documented, the synthesis method used for this paper is described in a very detailed way, also mentioning a few alternative steps that have been tried, but which caused failures in obtaining the desired structure.
While their synthesis method works very well for something improvised in a couple of days, it requires significant improvements, because the samples are very inhomogeneous, which greatly complicates the measurements and the interpretation of the results.
I believe that the properties of this material will not be completely elucidated until someone grows a monocrystal of it, but developing a process for this might take months, if not years.
Some literature suggests its a "one dimensiononal" superconductor only kinda works in tiny monocrystaline grains.
...But maybe thats even more interesting for, say, microelectronics? Especially if the resistance orthogonal to the superconductivity is high, if such a thing is even possible?
The one-dimensional things seems like it could make it complicated to measure the resistance. Especially since the bulk material that seems like people are making isn't being laid down in thin films where you might know which direction the conductivity might go. What if there are superconducting grains/domains that abut to each other, but the 1-D paths are then not aligned? Even if you knew that the "domains" were aligned with each other, but didn't know the orientation, it seems like you'd measure a drop-off in resistance, but not to zero at the critical temperature. Maybe?
Such things are possible, and not even very uncommon. The human body has tissues with conductivity different in different dimensions.
If you'd like to create one yourself, take a bunch of parallel insulated wires. Conductivity will be low along the wires, and high perpendicular to them.
Or alternated high-resistivity and low-resistivity sheets. Conduction will be low parallel to the sheets, and high going through them.
_If_ some of its properties change depending on the direction you measure, it can’t look the same in all directions.
As a simple example, consider graphite. That’s just ‘C’, but the crystalline version is layered, so it behaves differently depending on what direction you look at it.
Like wood, it will split easier when hammered parallel to the layers than when hit oblique to it.
"The author writes on the influence and meaning of the certain future superconductor revolution on humanity, and while showing similar guise as Western science, he attempts to maintain the notion of the Oriental spirit, the confidence and self-esteem of East Asian scientist."
Something like that. I'm not sure what it means.
I don’t think this would be zero-loss diodes - it would probably superconduct in some x-axis while being non-superconducting in the y- and z-axis. Even then, it’s not clear to me what the conductivity is like in the non-superconducting axies.
Well, yes. But both Silicon, Selenium and Germanium as well as all metals that are shiny are photoelectric. If this thing can form diodes that open a potential path to very high efficiency solar cells. It wouldn't be the first either:
How would that work? A diode requires a p-n junction created by doping the substrate. It has low resistance in one direction but ideally infinite resistance in the other direction.
I’d note they claimed to try the synthesis over 1000 times to arrive at their best sample. They admit to not being physicists and being more experimental chemists. If there is anything here, which at minimum seems they’ve found something interesting. The theoretic research published recently supporting their claims coupled with the discussion that the apparently superconducting material is less likely to form it’s probably (IMO, IANAP) a process that requires substantial refinement but holds a claimed experimental and theoretically demonstrated potential to be a room temperature normal pressure superconductor as claimed. There seems to be a lot of “their work is sloppy” and “their method isn’t refined” as a proof of a negative, but it’s just proof that science is done in many ways by many techniques and no one is sufficient, but everyone is necessary.
I think they have done that. The catch is that these scientists are likely to take their time, because they want to produce something with weight behind it. This isn't lab #5234's attempt to reproduce it which showed some weird behavior that might be a success, this is the expert report on the original material giving second opinion on how valid the first's claim is. That needs to have more care, which means more thoroughness doing the research and more time spent writing up the final result with care. If lab #5234's attempt ends up being a false positive or experimental error, it will be one of many and won't mean much, but if this particular report is wrong or has a major error, that is going to be impactful in a negative way.
> The production method is so poorly documented only a fraction of the samples being made shows any interesting properties.
I have understood that rather, the production method is poorly known even to the Koreans themselves, and also they have only a small success rate in their samples. So it's more that the Koreans themselves are not entirely sure what "makes it click", and you can't document it well because you don't yourself know all the details.
Would a ~200K superconductor be useful, if such a beast exists? Obviously not as good as room temp, but at least that's a temp you can maintain with dry ice and not liquid nitrogen.
With my conspiracy theory hat on, perhaps the authors were encouraged/coerced to not release proper documentation to reproduce the recipe entirely by [their bosses, state agencies etc.]
If the claims are true, then the implications to defense, weaponry and such are very high, and the C|N|D* agencies like to not lose their cards in the game..
/conspiracy
Or
Real science is just darned difficult, and the scientists are working hard to reproduce the results themselves. Which is more likely.
Right. From my own experience, growing crystals is close to alchemy. Of course we know exactly how to do it, yet, it takes a lot of skill to grow a lot of substances. There are a lot of detaills to the process which are difficult to capture in documentation, even if the best faith attempts are made.
Add to that any variation in the machinery used. As a consequence, it is quite common in crytallography that there is a single source for certain crytals. At least in an initial phase. If a substance becomes reasonably popular, eventually more people manage to produce quality crystals.
So I would expect eventually good samples to turn up elsewhere as many groups are working on this, but it can take a lot of time. Especially as no one knows what exactly was different about the Korean samples.
I'm no expert but based on my limited understanding, this result (if confirmed) while far from room temperature would still make LK99 a pretty interesting discovery in the SC world. And once a new SC like this is validated there are often methods discovered to improve the temperature or optimize other traits.
To me, the positive news here is that (if confirmed), at least LK99 isn't "nothing". Together with the recently released simulation studies indicating LK99 may have interesting SC-like properties, this causes me to increase my personal Bayesian SWAG estimate on LK99 (or a related descendant) eventually being a meaningful step toward room temp superconductors.
Agreed. Looking at the timeline on the Wikipedia page, a new 100K ambient pressure SC material is nothing to scoff at.
It means LK99 is about as good as the other materials, at minimum. However, its chemical composition is different than any of the other materials on the chart (i.e. it is lead based). That probably means there's lots to learn and new phenomena to be understood and optimized.
Furthermore, if this lab could achieve these results in a matter of weeks, perhaps labs with more exotic equipment and dedication will be able to get better results, raising the bar even higher.
Exactly. These are literally the first attempts to replicate a poorly explained production process.
Things are only going to get better over time as the materials increase in purity. These are other labs seeking publicity partly.
I for one think that this will turn out to be a major breakthrough based on the meta facts (decades of development for one) and not the actual science.
> It means LK99 is about as good as the other materials, at minimum. However, its chemical composition is different than any of the other materials on the chart (i.e. it is lead based)
While what you say is correct, let's not forget that lead _is_ an elemental superconductor. With a Tc of 7K, it's only bested by niobium (9K) and diamond (11K) as an elemental superconductor.
Yes, cuprates and ceramics were ruling high-temperature SC so far, but it's not like lead was entirely unexpected in the superconducting world.
It's always interesting to discover a new class of materials that make high temperature superconductors even if they haven't discovered a room temp one.
Looking at the key temperature-resistivity graphs, this feels like the data doesn't support the conclusion that there's a superconductor here. The temperature-resistivity graphs of superconductors I've seen all have a fairly steep cutoff--a sharp, vertical line at critical temperature. The log-scale here complicates my intuition, but what I see is a gradual transition into noise range. Also, the graphs I've seen have also demonstrated that the critical temperature varies with applied magnetic field. Here... there's no apparent variation in apparent critical temperature.
I'm sorry, but this result just feels to me like people are assuming that the material must be a superconductor and are analyzing all the data under that assumption rather than asking the question "is this a superconductor?"
The gradual drop could be the result of a mixed sample where different parts of the material show superconductivity at different temperatures. As more of the sample becomes superconducting, the resistance will gradually decrease until a superconducting path is created between the probes and the resistance reaches zero.
I should probably be fired for my prior answer because things like pn-junction diodes can definitely have an exponential-like dependence on temperature.
In my head I was thinking of pure elements, like bulk metals. But there definitely could be more interesting things going on in the sample, like diode formation (internally or at the contacts) or weird doping profiles. That may be part of why it's hard to measure the properties!
Intrinsic semiconductors or the semiconductors that are lightly doped with impurities have temperature ranges where the concentration of the free charge carriers increases exponentially with increasing temperature, like in the NTC (negative temperature coefficient) thermistors.
This causes a decrease in resistance towards higher temperatures, so it has nothing to do with any explanation for a decrease in resistance towards lower temperatures.
The diodes have increasing inverse currents towards higher temperatures, which also has nothing to do with any explanation for increasing currents towards lower temperatures.
Here the resistance decreases in the opposite direction, so it cannot be explained by changes in the concentration of free carriers, like in semiconductors.
In metals, the concentration of free carriers is constant and the resistance decreases towards lower temperatures because the mobility of the free carriers increases, i.e. there is less friction between them and the crystal lattice, because the vibrations of the latter have a smaller amplitude. However this does not lead to any exponential decrease of the resistance.
The weird current dependence on voltage and temperature that can be seen here is most likely caused by an inhomogeneous sample that is composed of many small domains with different electrical properties.
Moreover, the material may be anisotropic, so extra variability is added by the random orientations of the microcrystals that compose the ceramic sample.
On log-scale, a line will be an exponential in a linear curve. Here we have a curve on log-scale arcing down, which means it drops faster than exponential, which is, more or less, a cliff-like dropoff.
Does not seem to be a direct copy (the Wikipedia missing things like Progress/Status, Reliability of Claim) and also, the Wikipedia page can be collaboratively kept up to date, while the other is a random forum post "owned" by one user and the owners of the platform.
I'm curious why every tracker lists Argonne, though no status or progress listed. I'm sure there are a hundred other labs who've either done nothing, or are doing something without fanfare, so why Argonne?
Argonne is a highly regarded national lab; results from there would be highly credible. Also an Argonne staffer has gone on record[0] saying that they're attempting to replicate, while other labs have not said whether they're trying or not.
Personally I'm waiting for the Argonne results which should be done by the end of the week.
With you there. A lot of Chinese labs are listed e.g. but my own experience trying to replicate materials science results from "credible" Chinese labs has led to a lot of disappointment.
Yes, in particular, anyone can add citations that you can check if you're skeptical. In this case, the citation is an article from science.org [1], which includes the following quote:
> “They come off as real amateurs,” says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. “They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they’ve presented some of the data is fishy.” On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. “People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff.”
What makes me excited is there is very good theoretical work, using 'standard techniques ' that shows it either is a superconductor or will have very good properties in designing one.
Cold fusion, the EM drive, time traveling neutrinos, and all the other false excitement never had a theoretical backing. So 'guarded optimism' seems warranted
I suspect that account is just a troll who knows a bit about material science. They spend more time arguing and promoting the Soviet Union than sciencing. I gathered that after just 5 minutes of scrolling through their twitter. I suspect a retired and bored Soviet scientist maybe?
Anon is fine, I’m inclined to promote anons who do credible replications. Russian anon is not one of them, she really should take a video at the very least, even then her speck is so small until she released detailed measurements one can’t in good faith trust her. I won’t be surprised if at the end of all this, she just claims she was trolling in good fun and we’re the fools for taking anything she says seriously.
>I won’t be surprised if at the end of all this, she just claims she was trolling in good fun and we’re the fools for taking anything she says seriously.
Ah this again. No offense to you, but yes, the obnoxious anonymous Russian troll who's only proof is a photo of a spec of dust (glued?) in a syringe, who refuses to take a video, who says she didnt follow the paper beause she immediately invented a better way to make a different room temp superconductor, who says she doesnt care about superconductors and who keeps tweeting bizzare USSR propaganda?
I wonder why she's not included in the Wikipedia article. /s
I see a lot of "This must be real, why would labs publish this if they don't think it's real, they have nothing to gain." sentiment on HN lately. Or "Researcher's career would be ruined if they falsely claim to replicate.", and so on. I also want to believe! But I should add a bit of skepticism to the hype :)
- "this could ruin their career": Depends. If they posted completely fake numbers or intentionally fake videos. Sure, that would be bad. But none of this is peer reviewed, and all of this can be retracted. A contaminated sample? Oops, retract. Bad measurement methodology? Oops, retract. Sure, somebody will remember that you made the controversial paper in the first place, but as long as you are not provably fabricating, a lot can be attributed to "an honest error". There are tons of peer reviewed papers out there with errors that completely change the outcome. Does not mean the authors are "finished".
- "they have nothing to gain": Oh, they absolutely do. While "science should be fully objective", funding agencies very much aren't. Obviously, just like VC funding, science funding is not a complete coin toss. But having "the right" team and background is often as important as the idea itself. One way to get the right background is to "touch shoulders with the giants" and one way to get the right team is to be highly visible and attract talent.
So overall, if LK99 is eventually shown to be a superconductor by someone else, you have a lot to gain, even if your own initial study is not perfect.
Let's say your team synthesised something. It looks like LK99 and it has some properties that are not really superconducting but at least a bit unusual. This clearly isn't what you hoped for. Now, do you run a bunch of other controls to see if it is some form of contamination, process error, combination of both... or do you publish a vague click-bait paper on ArXiv and hope that other results will somewhat align with yours?
Finally, I'm not claiming this paper or any other paper intentionally published untrue or misleading results. Just that scientists are also people. They have FOMO, they follow trends, they see what they want to see. As always, big claims require big evidence, and so far we don't really have that. But that does not mean there isn't some truth to the big claims :)
A contaminated sample that materially change the composition but still yield a superconductor would be a novel finding.
An error in manipulation leading to an external communication on something this high profile is sure to affect your career. It's like a biologist claiming to have found evidence extraterrestrial life and having to retract. I think I would consider hara-kiri..
But the thing is... except for the original authors, none of these papers so far really claim to have a room-temperature superconductor, right? They claim "simulated band structure with low Fermi level", or "unusual levels of diamagnetism", or "almost zero resistance up to -100°C (but lack of phase transition)", etc.
Yes, retracting these is still shameful, but it's not a "we found extraterrestrial life" claim. It's a "we received weird signals from a nebula that we don't understand so far" claim.
And yes, a lot of supporting but inconclusive evidence is still supporting evidence. My point is not that (most) scientists would risk lying about replicating a superconductor, but rather that uncertain or inconclusive results with a solid chunk of plausible deniability in a rapidly evolving environment go a long way towards being "in the room where it happened".
I wouldn't bet on LK99 being a RTAPS but "Replicating a bunch of weird shit that we don't really understand that at least somewhat align with the possibility" really isn't a damning position to be in when the starting point is "The team says they only get a working sample about 10% of the time and everyone else is working off of pretty meh instructions on how to replicate"
This is not my area of expertise, but as a former scientist (at least at the PhD and postdoc level) I would not stake my credibility on something without being 1000% sure on a normal day, let alone when the topic is extraterrestrial life or room temperature superconductors.
Also, it's not true at all the retraction have no consequences. It is an indelible mark of shame.
I'm puzzled by this, looking at the resistance versus temperature graph they're not demonstrating zero resistance at 110K, they're demonstrating that at 110K the resistance becomes so low that it reaches the noise floor of their instrument. It's a stretch to call that superconductivity because when it come to that it needs to be actually zero, as in "I can put a current in a loop made of the material and come back one year later and it will still be there". Exponential decay will quickly catch up with a non-zero value, even very very small. Still this exponentially decreasing resistivity looks interesting, I have no idea if that's unusual or if that means anything. The weird dip at around 230K will need to be explained as well. I'm just an interested bystander, that goes without saying.
Well, that's one of the reasons demonstrating the Meissner effect is considered a better evidence of superconductivity. Of course any physical experiment always has a noise floor and a finite error. You can't exactly ever measure zero resistance because your probes and the probe-sample interface have nonzero resistance…
But looking at that graph, it would be an incredible coincidence if the resistance dropped like it does and then suddenly stabilized to some very small but nonzero value… That would probably require entirely new physics to explain and would be a much bigger news than "merely" a 110K Tc superconductor!
Groups that typically do resistivity measurements on regularly measure low-temperature resistivities on conducting materials of ~ 10s of micro Ohm m. So if you're measuring in this range on a conducting material and hitting the noise floor with a SHARP drop, that's a pretty big indicator of superconductivity (assuming you haven't just broken your contacts which is a concern when cooling things down). I'm not so familiar with PPMS systems, but I imagine it has some built in auto-adjust on the sensitivities to where you can be pretty confident your noise floor is below these values.
What is complicating the interpretation here is the log scale (and lack of conversion to resistivity): It is amplifying the impression of the noise below what they call Tc, and making it harder to interpret the approach of the material to the transition point. The behaviour at the approach to Tc also doesn't really look like a metal, which should scale as propto T, or a semiconductor which should increase with decreasing temperature. Possibly a result of it being some horrible mixed phase ceramic.
You certainly can use it as a batteryless inductor coil to zap people, similar to how you zap people with a charged capacitor. But a superconductor is limited by the magnetic field strength it can support. When the magnetic field strength goes up beyond the critical field by increasing the current, superconductivity is lost. In superconducting magnets, this causes a catastrophic failure called a "magnet quench". So a superconductor cannot store unlimited energy. In the original LK-99 claim, the critical current is 200 mA, it's not much.
This is so reminiscent of what happened after Fleischmann & Pons. Labs attempting to replicate saw this property, or that property, but never the whole, unequivocal picture.
Here we have a room temperature superconductor that isn't a superconductor at room temperature. A sample that has no measured Meissner Effect at any temperature. And the authors admit that some (many?) of the samples tested out as semiconductors.
Also, they don't happen to mention how they measured resistance. 1mA current, yes, but what equipment? And what setup? Micro-measurement of resistance is hard. We really need to know more about that.
To me the biggest difference is the three theoretical papers, including from very reputable sources, all showing that a) there is indeed something weird going on with this material and b) due to the unusual configuration it is going to be tricky to manufacture.
Fleischmann & Pons was never supported by theory and was essentially a "we measured something and have no idea what is going on". LK-99 is more of a "the theory says something interesting will probably happen, and we believe we measured it in some samples but can't reliably reproduce it".
I agree that the setup is not satisfactorily documented.
> but what equipment?
But at least this individual question is actually included in the paper. It was the Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS), manufactured by Quantum Design Inc. From the photo, one can clearly see that the DC resistance test fixture was used.
I read more about F&P and wow, there are striking similarities. The duo probably weren't fraudsters. No intentional deception in their work was ever found, so not like Hendrik Schon. They were basically forced to make their results public by their university, but it was very premature and they should have waited ten years. They were 100% legit, top researchers in the field before all this, and well after the scandal many scientists continued research in avenues initiated by F&P's original experiments (with little success). I can totally see LK-99, once it fails replication in a month, leading to more research but probably not yielding the holy grail.
I'm very much conservative about this paper because while the graph in Fig. 3a says $T_c^{zero}$ being 110 K, the "zero" resistance is actually only 1e-5 Ω (!) and even if the sample is possibly superconducting its critical temperature would be much lower than 110 K anyway. I'm aware of the difficulty in obtaining larger samples, but the label in that graph is really misleading regardless.
The resistance curve stopped at 1e-5 Ω because it has nearly reached the resolution limit of their instrument. Using 4-wire Kelvin sensing, the measurement current was 1 mA, the voltage read-out across the material was around 1 to 10 nanovolts - this is around the scale that some of the world's best general-purpose voltmeters can measure down to. The authors assumed that the negligible voltage drop, combined with the abrupt drop and flattening of the resistance vs temperature curve is already a convincing-enough indication of superconductivity.
Hopefully more rigorous testing will be done by one of the teams later.
Which is indeed their argument. But in that case they haven't proved that $T_c^{zero}$ = 110 K, they only proved that $T_c^{zero}$ < 110 K. (And I should also note that $T_c^{zero}$ doesn't imply the actual critical temperature $T_c$, while the title strongly suggests so.)
The random jumps in the resistivity around 250 K suggests that there is very bad contact resistance or a possible alternate current path. The drop in resistance doesn’t look like a typical phase transition (it is very broad in temperature). My guess would be that the voltage leads are not very well connected to the region of the sample that the current is flowing through. This could actually give a drop in the measured voltage (and therefore “resistance”) even though the actual resistance is increasing as the sample is cooled. It would be interesting if they also included two-point resistance across the current leads.
One of the authors commented in their previous video pre-announcement that they suspect it was a probe cleanliness problem, which they would investigate later.
Is this kind of thing typical for experiments working to confirm such significant results, or is there a mad rush to publish?
Do you really get a lot of prestige from confirming somebody else's result? I would have thought the risk to reputation from sloppy work would far outweigh it (see: the cold fusion shenanigans).
Probably a lab that confirms any piece of it will get a significant share of attention and acclaim.
I heard the research group got scooped by a former researcher. Former researcher outed them before they were ready for all the relevant questions. Not a particularly good thing to do for a career to out colleagues like that.
> I heard the research group got scooped by a former researcher. Former researcher outed them before they were ready for all the relevant questions. Not a particularly good thing to do for a career to out colleagues like that.
Either this or they tried to deny proper authorship to the guy, that antecipated the publishing in self-defense. It's early to point who was the party at fault, without proper investigation.
> Probably a lab that confirms any piece of it will get a significant share of attention and acclaim.
Why is that though? They're taking a discovery that somebody else came up with, and (mostly) follow a recipe they're given.
I mean if they were synthesizing a theorized substance or significantly improving its production, or measuring an effect that was previously undetectable by known instruments and experiments then those things would deserve acclaim on their own.
Not saying they aren't good scientists and labs working on this or reproducing is worthless, the reward just doesn't seem big enough not to be meticulous about it. If you're right then you'll be one of the dozens of labs that reproduced it and all credit goes to original discoverers. If you're wrong you'll be the ones who bungled the experiment and share just about equal blame.
It demonstrates efficiency and ability to do something complicated and challenging under time pressure. Maybe it shouldn't be considered a big academic achievement, but it's definitely an impressive practical achievement.
I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).
It's having these suspected dirty probes that they haven't investigated yet which is in particular what I'm talking about though. Since they made no particular experimental or theoretical breakthrough here, I just would have thought they would want to be meticulous about confirming an unexpected result. As you say, the point is to show their experimental capabilities.
> I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).
I'm not in the field, but I would have thought it would look pretty bad if they were wrong and their experiment had obvious sloppy practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion apparently that sunk a few reputations.
I completely understand a private rush to replicate for the purpose of building on it and making new discoveries, but just to put rush out a confirm paper? I suspect it's less about demonstrating actual efficiency and ability and more about the paper mill.
It is hard work, but relatively easy work proportional to the possible rewards, and has very few downsides:
1. An early preprint provides instant press coverage for the researchers, their lab and the entire university. Such opportunities are rare: I worked in academia full-time for decades, and never had an opportunity to do some fixed amount of well-understood work that guarantees an appearance in the national press. Such an appearance is very useful in inter-departmental politics, not to mention when dealing with government organizations staffed by non-researchers. E.g. if "biggest newspaper in country X" reported about your research, that by itself ensures that you won't have to apply for "shitty academic visitor visa to the UK", but can credibly apply for a "global talent, go straight to indefinite leave to remain" one instead. And if the effect turns out to be real, and you managed to reproduce the effect while lots of others tried and failed, that's going to look really good on the grant application where you have to explain why your lab is the best place to spend money earmarked for superconductor research. This is unlike other replication papers, which are not usually the "gets reported on national media kind, or even "many others tried and failed" kind, but usually the "nobody else cared" type.
2. The article will definitely garner some citations. Even if LK-99 does not pan out, there will be many many survey articles written about what's unfolding right now, and they will all definitely cite the earliest replications. Moreover, it doesn't matter if your first preprint has shit writing: you'll still be cited if the final version gets accepted 4 months from now, after many rewrites. This is unlike most random "reproduction" papers, which are unlikely to get published, much less cited. So reproducing LK-99 is in fact a good way to increase h-index.
3. As long as you don't do anything fraudulent, there's very little career risk involved with being fast-and-loose in a preprint. If LK-99 pans out you're definitely in the clear. If it doesn't, well, as every second comment here mentions, materials science is difficult, honest mistakes are easy to make, even reproducing results is incredibly finicky and hard. It's not like your lab was the only one making anomalous observations. Chances are nobody's going to care if you were involved in a false positive replication. In fact, probably nobody's going to read and scrutinize your whole publication list when hiring or promoting you, but they'll definitely care about your citation metrics. This is unlike most other reproduction papers, where you wouldn't get many citations even if you managed to publish, because nobody cared.
All in all, dropping everything else and working on this right now is a good strategy, even for investigators in prestigious labs that would otherwise not bother with reproduction papers.
Typically a valid comment in academia at large, but not when high-temperature superconductors are the subject of the fight. If these claims pan out, these guys may be the next Andy Viterbi or Ray Stata.
In this particular case I’d be less cynical as even laypersons are anxious to know what’s the result. So it’s natural that scientists that have the lab equipment are rushing to replicate or falsify the results.
Well, it's at a 1mA test current (I'm assuming a 4 point probe to mitigate contact resistance) so 10u Ohm would give a 10nV DC signal. That's a pretty small voltage signal and comparable to a fairly standard chopper stabilized instrumentation amp rms noise at room temp near DC.
I'm not sure whether higher currents are all that reasonable. Cooling the precision amp is an option to reduce the noise figure, but at that point you'll want optical isolation and battery supply too.
Thanks! That's great information. We had to make our own, but it's good to see that there are decent off the shelf systems. I agree that contact resistance on these tiny samples has got to be a huge issue (can they use mercury?). However, what I've seen suggests that even the low frequency AC measurements are more complex due to capacitive coupling effects. However, narrow bandwidth lock=in should improve noise... the equipment still just claims 10u Ohm.
I believe certain it is near impossible to actually measure truly zero resistance. Instead, a sudden drop near Tc, combined with the meissner effect is what confirms superconductivity.
I don’t understand the physics, but it feels like a truly zero resistance conductor would violate some law of thermodynamics or something.
Is a superconductor truly zero impedence or just very very very low? Because I’m seeing a lot of these graphs with something like: “0.00001ohm” as the y-axis floor.
It doesn’t though, that’s what’s so tantalizing about it. It’s counterintuitive but as I understand it, the current best theory of superconductor behavior properly conserves mass and energy and the math says a room temperature one should be perfectly possible. It’s just not been found. And yes, it’s truly zero resistance as far as we understand the concept of “resistance”.
Similar to how a magnet works. A magnet can hold something forever, so seems like a violation of thermodynamics. But "holding" isn't work, it's just force. (Which is still kinda spooky, admittedly) Similarly, conducting itself isn't work, it's just conduction.
Yes, as others already said, superconductors are zero resistance. Which is easy to check if you have enough of the substance to run meaninful currents through it. There might be miniscule amounts of resistance for contacting and impurities, but the resistance doesn't grow e.g. with wire length.
So how is this possible? The explanation is acutally reasonably easy, but requires the strangeness of quantum dynamics. One basic principle of quantum dynamics is, that at least most things are quantisized. Especially energy of a state comes in discrete amounts. That is the reason we have orbitals of electrons in atoms. They can only take very specific values, which creates these separate orbitals. There is no in between state, they have always to absorb or emit exactly the amount of energy which is the difference between orbitals when moving between them. Which is a very easy effect to literally see: take glowing phosphors as you find them on your watch etc. These are transitions bound to a specific photon energy. With red light, you cannot "charge" them, as red photons have to little energy, and you can only absorb single photons. Any green or blue light would work though. And whatever light you used to "charge" them, they always glow in the precise same color, coming from their destinct energy state.
The resistance an electron encounters while moving through a conductor is also quantisized. In superconductors we have a situation like trying to charge a watch dial with red light: the amounts of energy an electron could release cannot be absorbed by the material. And an interaction would require this. The consequence is: no interaction, no resistance.
The situation is like trying to buy a $1 bottle of water with a $100 bill. That could turn out to be impossible, because no one is willing to give you back $99, and you can of course not pay $100 for the bottle. So even when having the money, you can't buy the bottle.
This is, in a very naive way, the principle how superconductivity and superfluidity work. The trick now is to prepare the conditions which allow for superconductivity. One way is to make things increadibly cold. All metals become superconductive, if the temperature is close enough to 0. But that is with single digit degrees or below, even fractions of a Kelvin. Konsequently it was a huge sensation when the first complex substance was presented which showed the effect at larger temperatures. Since then the hunt is up to find better substances.
Let me get this straight: If you have a piece of phosphor, you can't heat it up with red light, regardless of the amount of red light you shine at it?
If so, does the red light bounce off? Go straight through?
Yes, it will of course absorb or reflect the red light like any stone would, but to "charge" its luminiszence you need at least green light - blue works great. That is, why you never could charge your watch dial with incandescent light, but any white LED will work great because their light usually contains a lot of blue light. Fun fact: though it is calles "phosphorescence" all those colors don't contain any Phosphor, that Phosphor isn't phosphorescent :p An error in early naming.
Thanks for the interesting new thing. If they suffer no loss in kinetic energy and a wave can move forever, could we use a circular pool of superfluid as an an energy storage mechanism?
I think it's a fair question. I guess the answer is "because we have superconductors, and no material with 'very small resistance' instead".
Also note that while there is zero resistance you still have parasitic currents and general interaction with the rest of the environment. So no perpetual motion for us today!
Even a 'very small resistance' would likely be prohibitive. Pure silver for instance is an excellent conductor, but when you're talking about the last little bits it's orders of magnitude difference between that and a superconductor, and those orders of magnitude difference in resistance translate into orders of magnitude more current. So even a small resistance would cause your MRI machine to have a resolution so low as to be unusable.
MR imaging is possible with permanent magnets and resistive (copper wire wound) magnets at low field strengths, below 0.35T or so. Above that the heating of the magnet windings becomes excessive and it would be very difficult to maintain a stable enough field strength.
Superconducting magnets are very nice as long as there is no quenching. The material used for conductors must be mechanically stable and perform consistently from one production batch to another. One reason why current high tc superconductors are not popular...
The material used for conductors must be mechanically stable and perform consistently from one production batch to another. One reason why current high tc superconductors are not popular
I was going to ask: Why don't we use the current high temperature superconductors, and start building grid interconnects? I guess part of the answer lies in the cost that would be incurred because of the mechanical properties of the existing superconductors.
Because it is easier to keep a localized thing cool than something that is 100's of km long. That's why iceboxes are boxes and not ice ribbons and why most applications of superconductors right now are using them as coils for magnetic field and volume economy. For instance there is one grid component that uses superconducting coils as inertia free stabilizers, they can be used to source and sink current very rapidly to absorb transients in the load. This allows older and less stable grids to be used to transfer wind power because the power over time is a bit lower. Allowing those peaks unfiltered onto the grid would cause parts of it to go down.
Because it is easier to keep a localized thing cool than something that is 100's of km long.
If we simply decided to make this kind of thing a priority, we could probably manufacture suspension components at scale. (Or create small tunnel boring machines and bury them?) We wouldn't need to replace all of the lines. We'd just need enough interconnects to make transferring more power economical.
The current best "High temperature", standard pressure superconductor only works at -150ish degrees Celsius. That's not as bad as cryogenic superconductors, but it is still a blocker for large scale use.
I think that the initial question was "why a 0 resistance compared to a ridicously low resistance". And my point is that it's easier to get a superconductor than some material with "ridicously low" resistance. As you said, silver is unusable for potent magnets, and such is any other non-superconducting magnets.
Probably if we had materials with a billionth of the resistance of silver they would work, but we haven't. And we have superconductors, luckly. :)
MRI scanners work just fine with regular electromagnets, or even plain old normal magnets. However, work better with stronger magnetic fields. In practice normal magnets end up being extremely large and heavy, and electromagnets end up using massive amounts of power. Both options are also limited in their field strength because getting enough stuff close together is tricky.
A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet which is way smaller and uses orders of magnitude less power. For extremely high field strength MRIs they are the only viable option, and for regular MRIs they are often the best option.
The more you crank up the field and gradients the better resolution you can get. Being able to take MRI of a beating heart depends on that sort of thing.
The current is ridiculously large and would lead to an unacceptably high power consumption and thermal expansion with the resistivity of even a good metal (copper).
The electrons are always moving in some direction. What a superconductor does is "just" making an electron pull others with it, making a cascade effect that biases the movement permanently.
There is no work or state change, so no reason at all to conflict with the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Ask yourself this question: Why does resistance occur at all? Why is it that electrons moving through a material cause them to heat up? What is actually happening to cause that?
At micro levels, like molecules bouncing around in a gas, collisions are lossless. What makes electrons moving through materials different?
Worth noting that the sample used did not produce a Meissner effect, but was still superconductive at ~100K.
> To further verify the superconducting properties, we conducted magnetic measurements on the sample, but unfortunately, no obvious Meissner signal was observed, indicating that the superconducting volume fraction of the sample may be very small. The preparation of high-purity samples are still a challenging task.
This is one of my key takeaways as well. It's a shame they didn't include their magnetization measurements, even if it didn't confirm superconductivity. The first conclusive paper will have to demonstrate a superconducting transition in both electrical resistivity and magnetization.
Question for the cognoscenti: supposing that LK-99 superconducts with T_c = 110 K, how significant a discovery would this be? I.e., does it establish a brand new class of high-T superconductors, or is it merely one unremarkable member of a known class? Further, does it offer advantages over other high-T superconductors such as ease of fabrication or cost?
The material cost is lower than most superconductors - it's lead and copper - but no one has any idea on fabrication, yield size, etc., now, so no good answers there.
To add to the other reply, it'd be a new class especially since it would be at standard pressure. I think the current highest Tc SC at standard pressure is at much lower temperatures. Frankly, there's probably a lot that you can do with a superconductor that you can cool with liquid nitrogen even if it can't carry much current or handle high magnetic fields. Moving from liquid helium cooling to liquid nitrogen alone significantly reduces the cost and complexity of your cooling system.
It's incorrect, yes. (about as incorrect as saying you're "1.8 degrees meters tall") But also, that's "U+2218 RING OPERATOR" on the page, not "U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN" but that may just be a typo.
According to the paper: Tc = 110 K, or around -163 °C. This is still pretty "cool", the existence of room-temperature superconductivity remains unverified. But assuming this paper is true, it means the material would still at least be a legitimate high-temperature superconductor in its own right, and the original claim would probably be cleared from being a deliberate fraud.
Here's Brian Keating interviewing Jorge Hirsch from UC San Diego and Inna Vishik of UC Davis [0]. Prof Hirsch was/is a leading critic of the U Rochester papers, but thinks that LK-99 could work.
Except for the fact that both materials contain lead, there is no resemblance.
Lead is one of the best superconductors among pure metals, whose superconductivity has been already discovered 110 years ago, in 1913.
Nevertheless, there is absolutely no relationship between the superconductivity of pure lead and the alleged superconductivity of lead zirconate titanate and the alleged superconductivity of lead phosphate doped with copper.
They have very different crystal structures and behaviors of the free electrons (i.e. electronic band structures).
Only if in the PZT samples used by the Navy there would have been some impurities, without the knowledge of the researchers, causing contraction of the crystal when substituting the big lead atoms, then there would have been a similar mechanism to what is claimed now.
If this mechanism is proven to really work, then it could also work in other crystals with big ions, like lead or baryum, perhaps even in PZT.
> The application claims that a room-temperature superconductor can be built using a wire with an insulator core and an aluminum PZT (lead zirconate titanate) coating deposited by vacuum evaporation with a thickness of the London penetration depth and polarized after deposition.
> An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity.
> It is important for the PZT coating to undergo a polarizing (poling) treatment prior to RTSC enablement, so that
optimal domain alignment is obtained within the ceramic coating, by subjecting the coating to a strong dc current
electric field, slightly below the Curie temperature (approx.200 0C, but possibly as high as 360 0C, depending on
PZT ceramic composition). Furthermore, to increase the probability of vibration in one particular direction, as well
as to alleviate the brittle nature of the ceramic material, it may be necessary to make the 'metallic' wire coating out of
a composite PZT and highly conductive polymer, such as p-Terphenyl [4]. Another option is to sandwich the PZT
ceramic in between two layers of aluminum, resulting in a wire design which may be planar rather than cylindrical
in nature. This composite coating design would amplify piezoelectrically-induced vibrations and possibly render
them unidirectional.
From LK99 rumors:
> At the beginning of 2020, Ji-Hoon Kim continued to do experiments as usual, suddenly he found a huge peak, he repeated the test + looked at his notes. But didn't find any special points. He started looking through the lab videos. He finally realized that the tube of sample came out with cracks on the quartz tube, and he hit his elbow on the table while transferring the sample out to the electronic scale. Introducing oxygen at the right moment + a violent impact would change the structure of the lead apatite crystals being formed.
May be something, may be nothing,
S.C.Pais: "to increase the probability of vibration in one particular direction"
S.C.Pais: "piezoelectrically-induced vibrations [ and possibly render them unidirectional]"
LK99: "oxygen at the right moment + violent impact would change the structure of the lead apatite crystals being formed"
And now for a slightly different take on the much-discussed room temp. superconductors:
on the off chance that this LK-99 stuff is actually going to be a thing, how should that influence my investment portfolio over the course of the next five years?
Should I buy lead mining stock ?(joke, obviously, but you get the point).
It would bias our energy markets towards electric and away from fossil fuels. But due to climate change, there’s already a lot of pressure to go in this direction.
> In conclusion, we successfully synthesized the compound Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O, and observed the zero resistance above 100 K. However, the Meissner effect has not been observed yet in our samples, which suggests that the superconducting volume is relatively low.
It's likely that impurities in the bulk of the sample are why we aren't seeing the Meissner effect. Seeing super conductivity though is extremely promising.
We've seen a sample be super conductors at 110k ambient pressure, diamagnetism, and (unconfirmed) flux pinning. So it's likely there's something here, but right now the main hurdle is synthesis. It's difficult to make and there's no clear path to consistency, purity or scale.
Note that there is no signs of phase transition (no jump) and the values below 110K are around reasonable measurement resolution. It may be that they just got the resolution threshold and misinterpret it as SC
This exact paper is the newest progress on recent hype regarding a semi-trustworthy not-peer-reviewed study claiming 'superconductors at room temperature'.
'Superconductors at room temperature' are cool because they would answer questions like "How would we get solar power from [your local desert] everywhere else for free?" and "How are we going to use MRIs when the helium runs out?" as two examples.
The most compelling evidence offered thus far is from actual scientists that have reviewed the LK-99 paper and determined the scientists involved aren't very good at science.
In the observations, this sample they tested did not exhibit the Meissner effect at room temperature. Which means it’s not the same thing the original team discovered?
I also did that the first time when reading the abstract. Very relatable. "It's on the front page of HN, so it must be a remarkable result," my subconscious seemed to assume on my behalf. ;)
The biggest near future tech for superconductors: fusion power.
One huge area of exploration for fusion power is tokamok reactor design, which requires a very strong magnetic field to confine plasma within a round shape - typically a torus, though I think I read of one spherical shell.
I suppose these don't necessarily need room temperature super conductors, but cheaper and easier to manufacture superconducting materials to use as the magnets could make a huge difference. And I do wonder if allowing higher temperatures could aid in the operability of these future devices.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/fusion-2662267312 is one I read about recently, using YBaCuO as the superconducting electromagnet. Definitely sounds bottlenecked on production of it.
Fusion power, as any energy source that massively increases the amount of energy humans can harness, could be planet changing.
I think energy storage, motors / accelerators and weapons would come first. A superconducting linear motor would probably also make for a great cannon.
Yeah, you're probably right - fusion has a lot of hard problems to solve. But for it, cheaper superconductors could be the game changer we need. For these other things... We already have energy storage, motors, weapons etc. It's certainly reasonable to think we could build better ones but I'm more excited for fusion, as it has the ability to solve climate change and provide cheap electricity to the billions who don't yet have it at the same time, probably resulting in double digit economic growth in many places.
I think that's reasonable, though I'm skeptical that fusion would solve climate change even if we perfected it tomorrow. It still has the issue of radioactive waste at end-of-plant-life since all of the critical parts are irradiated. It also doesn't solve the issue of chemical processes that release a good chunk of total CO2 emissions, and are largely independent of energy production.
I think the thing solves our environmental issues is actually industrial electrolysis, because then it doesn't really matter what your power source is, you have a means of decarbonizing chemical processes, and an incentive to commoditize carbon. Essentially, waste would have value, because it's a cheap source of carbon that can be used with hydrogen to create methanol, dme, etc. Not to mention, hydrogen salt cavern storage is proven at scale for 4 decades now to the tune of 350GWhs or so, and it lets us decarbonize agriculture and cement production.
I guess fusion might help make energy cheaper for these processes, but I don't really see that it matters if they're powered by fission or wind and solar. But if we can't get electrolysis cheap enough, then I don't see these processes being decarbonized until we're almost out of fossil fuels.
If we are talking DARPA money, I think working out how to build IC sensors using this stuff would be much quicker to reach manufacturing then a large scale motor winding.
I am sure defense folks would have a field day with new sensors with virtually no thermal noise.
Can this even work? Seems like air resistance would make applying all the force at ground level problematic - you'll have higher max Q and higher energy losses to air than if a conventional ticket delivered the same push over a longer period
In the most ELI5 way possible, a superconductor is a material that doesn't lose any energy or produce heat when used as a cable/wire, and at the same time also a very strong magnet.
MRIs and powerlines are more obvious applications, but theoretically you can do a lot of cool stuff (batteries with zero energy loss, heat-efficient computers, etc [1]). If true, LK-99 would allow these things to happen at room temperature instead of negative whatever degrees, making them much more useful.
My understanding is that this unlocks future-tech... Post quantum computing, hyper efficient rail tech, fast charging batteries, etc. Pretty neat stuff, and even cooler to be able to follow this as it develops.
I really really wanted this to be true just so we can all take a look at how much wrong some things are in academia and science nowadays.
Plenty of "knowledgeable" people and research groups put out a lot of discrediting (and actually ignorant) statements about this, a lot of them with a dash of xenophobia in the mix.
Congrats to the people that actually push science forwards!
Haters gonna hate but no one will remmeber them, ever.
I see lead (Pb...something) as main ingredient, isn't it banned in most industries because how toxic it is and how hard it's to handle in industrial scale? isn't that a problem for potential mass applications?
(lots of comments about this discovery call this revolution that will change everything around us and that somehow implies mass production I guess)
A high chance that lead can be replaced with other metal, from what I heard.
Also, it’s not extremely toxic - romans ate from lead dishes and didn’t even notice the toxicity.
You don’t want to consume it, and you don’t want to breathe it, but it’s not as bad as say, asbestos.
If you have an ICE car, it probably has a lead-acid battery, and the only thing that prevents us from using lead in grid storage is their short lifespan - not health or ecology :)
Also, if you ever took an x-ray, you wore a lead jacket to prevent unnecessary radiation.
If we cannot avoid lead in this alleged superconductor, it may limit applications slightly, but not by much.
It's banned in the EU under RoHS .. but with a whole load of exemptions, which make it kind of pointless. I suspect this would be exempted pretty quickly once it became important.
If this discovery is confirmed then someone will figure out how to do this safely, using robots or other kinds of machines to produce superconductor wires. The benefit derived would be simply too great to ignore it. Perhaps superconductors don't show up in your home but I can certainly imagine applications in optimising power grids.
Reliable production of the material is an engineering problem. If it can just be shown to work once, then the goal will be to mass-produce it in useful forms and structures.
Replication has been partially successful, exhibiting remarkable new results that are already worth celebrating.
Western media isn't silent. It has been showing up in the science section of mainstream media for a few days now, with a healthy dose of skepticism around it.
It's in the New York Post, on CNET, on CNBC, the Washington Post, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and plenty more. Just because CNN isn't covering it 24/7 doesn't mean the western mass media is "silent".
I remember seeing something like this that ran on bitcoin a while ago. It was completely user driven and lines were dynamically calculated by the action. I'm not sure how the resolutions to the bets were determined exactly, perhaps there was a requirement of a third party indicator of some sort, I don't recall.
Indeed. I always tell it to use proper fancy quotes and proper apostrophes in its output, but I can't get it to do it 100% of the time despite trying out many prompt variations and telling it the Unicode values etc etc.
The chemical formula "Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O" can be written in Unicode as follows:
Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O
Please note that not all characters may be perfectly aligned due to font
variations and rendering differences in different systems. However, this
representation should provide a close approximation to the chemical formula.
As plain text: Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O
EDIT: Note that arxiv uses mathjax (JS) to take a compound formula as plain text and applies subscript, superscript, etc. styling to it. ("Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O")
The SI unit is just “kelvin” because it’s an absolute scale. Usually “degrees” is only used with Celsius and Fahrenheit scales because they are relative. Not sure about Rankine…
> zero on the Rankine scale is absolute zero, but a temperature difference of one Rankine degree (°R or °Ra) is defined as equal to one Fahrenheit degree
But Rankine is an absolute scale. "By analogy with the SI unit, the kelvin, some authors term the unit Rankine, omitting the degree symbol."
Ah, interesting - this NIST page uses °R, which is at odds with the explanation in the other page on Kelvin (which doesn’t mention Rankine). I’m not sure if that’s because there’s a strong convention to use the degree symbol with Rankine or if there’s an additional reason not mentioned by the Kelvin page
Technically the units of temperature are "degrees Celsius", "degrees Fahrenheit", "Kelvin", etc. ie "degrees" is part of the name of the units "degrees Celsius" and "degrees Fahrenheit". "Kelvin" is the name of the unit by itself, so "degrees" is not supposed to be used before Kelvin.
In practice everyone's so used to saying "degrees" for temperatures that they end up saying it with Kelvin too.
An entirely new category of superconductor could well be revolutionary even at this temperature, for several reasons. It could be the first one of a family with variants that go up to room temperature. It could be cheaper to produce or have other desirable properties for commercial applications. And it could lead to advances in theory that would allow prediction of other unknown superconductors.
First, at a minimum it validates that the researchers found a novel rare superconductor at ambient pressure, and are not frauds.
Second, the new mechanism of superconductivity may lead scientists to explore other materials with similar properties that may work better.
Third, the synthesis may not be completely spot on yet. It has been just 4 days of attempting replication, and this result is pretty good in that context.
This is not about 110K, this is about trying to verify the results related to LK-99.
The LK-99 that is room temp superconductive seems quite difficult to produce at this early stage. But these researchers were able to produce their not-as-good version of LK-99 and at least verify very close to superconductivity at 110K. This makes the LK-99 room temp superconductivity claims that much more plausible.
YBCO and BSCCO are superconductors around 100K at ambient pressure. Unfortunately their brittleness limits their practical use. Maybe LK-99 will have better mechanical properties.
In this paper it is mentioned that the fact that the material is very fragile made it difficult to obtain pieces of a consistent size and form for measurements.
Moreover, from the results of the theoretical papers it is suggested that perhaps this material would work best as a monocrystal, with anisotropic conduction properties.
That could still have very important applications, but not for making cables or coils.
The original report is billed as a "room temperature superconductor" (iirc up to 28c). If it is indeed a superconductor at room temperature, it would be the first of it's kind and enable functional usages for superconductors previously impossible.
Maybe some people wanna focus on the work and not on the geek cred.
(I need to write some thesis like thing soon, like 15 years after my masters thesis that was written in latex, and do I really want to bother setting latex up again and futz with templates and fight for correctly positioned figures, or just use Word and be done with it?)
One don't "just" use word, and it's certainly never done with. Unless you found a room temperature superconductor and half the people will simply not care if you wrote it in a piece of paper (yet half will care... for some reason), you will have to spend all your time fixing formatting issues and keeping things on their correct state.
I was stupid enough to write a paper in Word once. Given the choice, I will never repeat the mistake.
I completely ignored the authors (as I usually do) and started reading it, noticed the slightly odd phrasing, and then chuckled at "mad great efforts" and then "a very excited news" a short while later before looking at the authors and realising the country of origin.
The claim: Room temp (~300K) superconductor exists and we got it!
The replication attempts: The production method is so poorly documented only a fraction of the samples being made shows any interesting properties. And among those interesting ones, results varies. Very few, if any, attempt actually completely shows the entire spectrum of properties and behaviors of a true superconductor at room temperature yet. But those kinds of experiments take time so it isn't an indicator of problem.
My take: It is probably something interesting but not well understood. Best case scenario, the original sample in the Korean lab probably won the synthesis lottery and is actually a true room temp superconductor. Worst case scenario, we got another class of high temp (warmer than liquid nitrogen but cold enough that applications are limited) superconductor but nothing revolutionary since at this point, it is pretty conclusive that there is something interesting with LK-99.