So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it?
That would be a wild story if true.
That would be a wild story if true.
Wild guess is that the dopant that creates wells doesn't always end up where it should. The paper that claimed superconductivity in layers of graphene at very particular angles also seems to be very sensitive. A similar one claimed graphene with alkanes was observed to superconduct. Perhapes whatever impure hydrocarbon they were using held the sheets at the perfect angle. All the quantum wells these things are claiming to rely on seem terribly difficult to arrange perfectly enough to work consistently. Assuming any of them ever did.
I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same. Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so you can engineer getting exactly the desired products from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring or keeping careful control of temperature, you get... something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball" it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but with better equipment an idiot with no experience can make it do what they wanted because the numbers were correct.
Even an old rusty razor blade will work as a diode if you try hard and long enough.
They had to get pretty creative in their use of ironsand to produce high quality steel.
Notably phosphorus is very hard to get rid of when it's in your metal. Before better metallurgy, the best steel worldwide was made out of low-phosphorus ores.
Its not enough to produce the material itself, it seems it is an emergent property of the structure and formation of the material similar to piezoelectric effect?
No, we don't know how to reproduce it, with "we" being everyone not on the South Korean team.
The papers everyone is trying to work from to replicate this are the "leaked" arXiv papers. That actual peer reviewed paper is still in process, and presumably that one includes more information on how to replicate the material.