Hacker News Reader

Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

"However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample"

OK I'm starting to actually believe that LK-99 might be the real deal.

View on HN

It’s sort of an amazing time. All the things we projected were 30 years out 40 years later and manifesting. The degree of skepticism is high, as should be, but the things we knew were achievable just hard to discover are rapidly unfolding. What falls next?

(N.b., I know I’m displaying unreasonable hubris and it’s still more likely than not an illusion or fabrication, but it certainly feels a lot of long term investments are rapidly coming to a head - AI, space, cancer treatments, aging research, EV, even flying cars and fusion - what a great time to be alive)

Can anyone explain what this means in relation to the ability to synthesize it in superconducting form?

Is there a way to force the Cu to the correct site? Or is looking for a new material with similar properties the way forward

I’m currently in a Twitter space with some accounts who know more about this process and this question was answered a few minutes ago. To summarize: no one has yet found a way to “steer” which sites get Cu and which ones don’t. This paper simultaneously makes LK-99 look like the real deal but also points out there may be more, or much more work, to reliably direct the replacement. Someone in the space said “if you find a way to get the Cu to the right site that’s a Nobel Prize”

Link to the space, https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbrgVyoqKX

If some third party scoops a more reliable process that would seem unfortunate for the original group.

I don’t think so, not at this point. Their foundational theory and experiments to objectively prove it are more than enough. Anything that follows could be too but it doesn’t diminish what these guys have discovered.

There will be thousands of people working on this now. These guys are the shoulders they all stand on.

I mean, it’s the higher energy site, right? So heat it?

Better yet, do something like a microwave oven tuned to Lead’s resonant frequency to encourage all the sites to be in the higher energy state as the crystal structure is forming.

I'm not an expert on chemistry but it sounds like this would make it ridiculously hard to obtain a high quality sample. Copper can substitute for either lead site; I'm not aware of macroscopic processes that would favor one over the other. Problems like that are usually handled ad hoc. The authors seem to have bumped and shuffled their way there through the darkness.

For context, the preparation of tetrataenite was pursued for decades (first partial success October 2022) even though the structure was well-known and the constituents are just nickel and iron.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com