Hacker News Reader

Comment by elfbargpt | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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