LK-99 Room Temp Ambient Pressure Superconductor

[kerbiloid]

Without the full process.

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

We already have claims of independent replication and positive results.

Same thing happened with cold fusion.   Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  When people want something really badly, the sifting process needs to be extraordinary as the bias, unconscious or otherwise, will be extraordinary

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

The thing that interests me is the 'partial' superconductivity element of the story. 

There is a possibility that they stumbled onto a process that gets close to creating a superconducting crystalline structure (and does, at times replicate it) - but they're just not there yet on the right mix of chemistry and physical process to be consistent.  If true?  We could see something interesting come out of this. 

[darthgently]

1 minute ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The thing that interests me is the 'partial' superconductivity element of the story. 

There is a possibility that they stumbled onto a process that gets close to creating a superconducting crystalline structure (and does, at times replicate it) - but they're just not there yet on the right mix of chemistry and physical process to be consistent.  If true?  We could see something interesting come out of this. 

Yes, a lot of "ifs".  Kind of like where we were before these announcements, so we need solid, repeated, replication to verify.  This is the way.

[StrandedonEarth]

On 8/4/2023 at 9:42 AM, darthgently said:

An overview of the noise, fwiw

 

Excellent article that explains a lot.

3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The thing that interests me is the 'partial' superconductivity element of the story. 

There is a possibility that they stumbled onto a process that gets close to creating a superconducting crystalline structure (and does, at times replicate it) - but they're just not there yet on the right mix of chemistry and physical process to be consistent.  If true?  We could see something interesting come out of this. 

What I get out of that article is that the process depends entirely on luck (aka random chance) to get the right atoms in the right places in the crystals. Maybe if they can figure out the exact configuration that is superconducting, they can nano-print it.

That would be game-changing, for sure.

Edited August 6, 2023 by StrandedonEarth

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 hours ago, darthgently said:

Yes, a lot of "ifs".  Kind of like where we were before these announcements, so we need solid, repeated, replication to verify.  This is the way.

I see a slight difference between this and your cold fusion analogy - and that is the apparent superconductivity behavior with what look like small magnets.   Big maybe, here, I know. 

But your point is well taken.  Cold fusion and copper EM drive 'promise' remain unrealized 

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/11/22/this-rocket-engine-breaks-a-law-of-physics-but-a-nasa-test-says-it-works-anyway/) 

Edited August 6, 2023 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[KSK]

7 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The thing that interests me is the 'partial' superconductivity element of the story. 

There is a possibility that they stumbled onto a process that gets close to creating a superconducting crystalline structure (and does, at times replicate it) - but they're just not there yet on the right mix of chemistry and physical process to be consistent.  If true?  We could see something interesting come out of this. 

That's my hope.  A lot of solid-state chemistry is basically high tech shake-and-bake*. Grind the powders together, shove them in a tube furnace and heat to gods-only-knows-what temperature for a defined period of time. For a finicky structure such as a superconductor, it wouldn't surprise me at all (although that's possibly down to a small amount of knowledge being a dangerous thing) that different labs are producing non, or partially, superconducting variants of LK-99, and having difficulty duplicating the original work.

That's assuming the original work is kosher of course, but science will sort that out. 

 

 

* With apologies to any working solid-state chemists in the room!

[DDE]

Ginsburg center for high-temperature superconducting and quantum materials, Lebedev physics institute, have come to the press with a vehement rebuttal. They found the synthesis instructions to be erroneous and had to reverse-engineer a synthesis process from the provided chemical formulae. Both resultant materials were insulators and demonstrated no exotic structure or behaviors.

https://m-gazeta-ru.translate.goog/science/2023/08/08/17384882.shtml?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

In truth, we might never know. That's exactly the kind of secret sauce that doesn't benefit from scientific transparency.

[KSK]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Ginsburg center for high-temperature superconducting and quantum materials, Lebedev physics institute, have come to the press with a vehement rebuttal. They found the synthesis instructions to be erroneous and had to reverse-engineer a synthesis process from the provided chemical formulae. Both resultant materials were insulators and demonstrated no exotic structure or behaviors.

https://m-gazeta-ru.translate.goog/science/2023/08/08/17384882.shtml?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

In truth, we might never know. That's exactly the kind of secret sauce that doesn't benefit from scientific transparency.

I haven't read the LK-99 preprints so I can't properly comment on this - and I'm definitely not going to throw shade at the scientists involved off the back of a pop-sci article - but in this case the chemical formula doesn't help much at all. In fact it rarely does, even for very simple molecules. For example:

C₂H₆O  could be ethanol (CH₃-CH₂-OH)  or dimethyl ether (CH₃-O-CH₃)

The first can be a pleasant component of certain drinks, although I don't recommend chugging the neat stuff straight from a lab bottle. I don't recommend drinking the second one at all, not least because it has a boiling point of -23^oC.

Back to the actual article.

The formula given for LK-99 is Pb _10-x Cu _x (PO ₄ ) ₆ O.

That's not even a single formula since it covers a range of materials from Pb₉Cu(PO₄)₆O,  (x=1) all the way to PbCu₉(PO₄)₆O (x=9).  Then there's the added twist that  the formula is effectively an average formula for the bulk material, so it's quite possible to have non-integer values of x.

Basically, this is a lead compound in which some of the lead atoms have been replaced by copper. How many lead atoms get replaced, and where the copper atoms end up in the eventual material is probably going to a) be critical to any superconducting properties and b) be highly dependent on synthesis conditions.  Which is why I raised an eyebrow at:

"In one series of experiments, the recipe described by the Koreans was exactly reproduced, in the other, a substance was obtained with the indicated final formula, but by the correct method. To do this, we had to change the raw materials and the course of the reaction."

I strongly suspect that there's been a lot lost in translation there, both from the science to pop-science translation and then the Russian to English translation. Both are quite understandable,  however, as it stands, that article isn't particularly helpful (in my opinion) for judging whether the Lebedev results invalidate the original Korean results.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the actual Korean team is having a hard time replicating their own results.  Chemistry can be a beast like that - sometimes the key to making a reaction work turns out to be some quirk of your experimental setup that you just haven't noticed and so didn't report in your paper. There's a reason why you'll see comments in scientific papers that such-and-such a process either worked or didn't work in our hands.  Aka 'we're not going to call you out on this, but we think there's something about your setup that you haven't properly considered'.

 

 

Edited August 8, 2023 by KSK

[sh1pman]

24 minutes ago, KSK said:

Chemistry can be a beast like that - sometimes the key to making a reaction work turns out to be some quirk of your experimental setup that you just haven't noticed

True. I’ve lost a few months trying to replicate a particularly difficult PCR. Worked once, then never again. Moved on to other things in the end. So we’ll just have to wait, I guess…

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, sh1pman said:

True. I’ve lost a few months trying to replicate a particularly difficult PCR. Worked once, then never again. Moved on to other things in the end. So we’ll just have to wait, I guess…

But the important thing is you didn't resort to cutting and pasting images of PCR results in your papers to make it look like you found something like that one guy.  Can't recall the details but it took a persistent college freshman at the college newspaper to bring attention to the scam

[Codraroll]

On 8/4/2023 at 9:16 PM, kerbiloid said:

cold fusion reactor + hot supermagnet + Em-drive = ...

Not sure, but I think spacescifi has made a thread or two about it.

[StrandedonEarth]

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

 

On 8/4/2023 at 12:16 PM, kerbiloid said:

cold fusion reactor + hot supermagnet + Em-drive = ...

Not sure, but I think spacescifi has made a thread or two about it.

 

We need the hot superconductor for the cold fusion reactor to power the emdrive…

[TheSaint]

[magnemoe]

On 8/4/2023 at 9:16 PM, kerbiloid said:

cold fusion reactor + hot supermagnet + Em-drive = ...

Well the two first don't break the laws of physic. Em-drive breaks multiple. 

How I was sure Em-drive did not work was an simple thought experiment : Make an reasonable long beam who rotate around it center, use an em drive on each end to spin this in an large vacuum chamber. 
The drives and edge of beam will accelerate at an constant acceleration, say 1 rpm/minute more every 2 hour. However doubling the RPM quadruples the energy stored, so at some RPM you can connect this to an generator and extract power as the increase in RPM is much larger than the power the em-drives uses. Free energy is an nice bonus. 

You could obviously use this in space, two rotors like this counter rotating powering the em-drive in the rear and it would accelerate forever once its spun up. 

[darthgently]

First segment of Sabine's latest gives good LK99 overview with replication attempt overview link in vid description

 

[Jacke]

This Twitter post from Sabine Hossenfelder is spot on.

 

[Jacke]

However things work out for LK-99, it's likely to be limited in its applications because it's a ceramic and even if a superconductor at high temperatures, it's likely not to have a high current limit before its superconductivity breaks down.  Unless it's cooled to lower temperatures.  Because, as the video below points out, that's the same for the high-temperature (liquid-nitrogen temperatures) superconductors we've known about for 30 years or so.

Thunderf00t has a bit of an attitude in his videos, but he does point out something important.  Liquid-nitrogen temperature superconductors have been around for 30 years, but have virtually no applications use.  The current LK-99 material has the same drawback as them: they're made of ceramics who's material properties (fragility, can't be connected after manufacture, easily driven out of superconducting over a certain current or by magnetic fields) are far from ideal as opposed to the alloy wires currently in use, including for liquid-helium temperature superconductors.  So even if there's a form of LK-99 that's a high-temperature low-pressure superconductor, it being a ceramic will limit its applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3hubvTsf3Y

[Nuke]

definitely a feedback loop between the scientists, the science media, and the general public. scientists post video to show  their colleagues, people get excited and start jumping to conclusions. once the media gets ahold of it all bets are off. they get the people excited and the video goes viral, the scientists see all the commotion, mistake the public reaction for actual peer review and then get overly excited about the as till now inconclusive results. 

real science is slow, good science is glacial. besides if it actually works, it will be patented, ignored until the patent expires and then you might see it on a flying car sometime in the late 2070s. scientists trying to get patents is usually a red flag though. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by Nuke

[darthgently]

12 hours ago, Jacke said:

Thunderf00t has a bit of an attitude in his videos

Do you really think so?  Ha ha.  Seriously, it almost gets in the way of the content 99% of the time, a constant background grumbling

[monophonic]

On 8/12/2023 at 8:09 AM, Jacke said:

However things work out for LK-99, it's likely to be limited in its applications because it's a ceramic and even if a superconductor at high temperatures, it's likely not to have a high current limit before its superconductivity breaks down.

Until someone figures out how to make ICs out of the stuff at least. Unless I am mistaken is there a chance a room temperature superconductor, even if ceramic and limited to low currents, would allow building non-cryogenic quantum computers. Or very least a quantum leap in CPU/GPU power efficiency.

[kerbiloid]

Still not classified?

Well, well..

[steve9728]

One more academic paper about "we have solid evidence that LK-99 is not a superconductor": Ferromagnetic half levitation of LK-99-like synthetic samples

 

Edited August 15, 2023 by steve9728

[NFUN]

10 hours ago, monophonic said:

Until someone figures out how to make ICs out of the stuff at least. Unless I am mistaken is there a chance a room temperature superconductor, even if ceramic and limited to low currents, would allow building non-cryogenic quantum computers. Or very least a quantum leap in CPU/GPU power efficiency.

You still almost certainly want cold temperatures for noise purposes. Phonons are a big part of superconducting quantum computers and I imagine you want low temperatures to have a good environment for those, plus blackbody radiation, etc

[PakledHostage]

On 8/9/2023 at 3:26 PM, darthgently said:

First segment of Sabine's latest gives good LK99 overview with replication attempt overview link in video

 

Sixty Symbols have done a video on this topic now too: