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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

Multiple teams have said they had to produce 10 batches just to get one sample with properties worth reporting on.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that different teams are all ending up with different variations of a common material, with different impurities, crystal structure, etc.

There's likely a whole zoo of interesting materials here!

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Yes, I thought that that might be the case from day one. When they wrote that they had only a 10% success rate it was clear that they were not at all in control of sample purity. The big remaining question for me is what happens when they start traveling with the original sample to have another lab test their samples and how those results compare with both the original results and the independently recreated different samples.

There is a good chance that there will be substantial differences between them.

“Purity” is a really overloaded term here. There are vast set of material properties that simply don’t map to a definition “purity” as in some homogeneous concentration of a material. This is so early no one likely knows exactly what configuration of material to “purify” for the intended outcome.

There will likely be years of not decades of looking at differences in the materials and performance of related materials to more fully explore this discovery.

Yes, true, let me unpack that then:

- purity as in the sample is uniformly constructed of the right atoms but they are not in the right configuration

- purity as in the sample contains atoms that shouldn't be there in the first place

and finally

- purity as in: the sample that purportedly did show room temperature superconductivity turns out to be the impure one and that impurity is so poorly understood that we currently can not replicate it accurately, but a test by an independent lab of the sample would verify the properties as advertised.

All of these are possibles, and not mutually exclusive.

> purity as in the sample is uniformly constructed of the right atoms but they are not in the right configuration

The conclusions in the linked pdf suggest this may be the issue with LK99.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892

More than likely there is only one interesting material in this specific composition. But understanding the phenomenon we are observing in this material can potentially lead to the development of other materials which display these characteristics, and tune those to function in this way at specific temperature/pressure situations. If we develop efficient ways to produce these materials in bulk (which is orders of magnitude more complicated than just characterizing what we see here) it would be unimaginably revolutionary. But the energy required to do this at scale will likely require our civilization to utilize orders of magnitude more energy, so if this is practical for our daily lives on a wide scale I believe it's development will be contingent on harnessing fusion. Otherwise it will be limited to only the most extreme use cases in the way superconductors are currently used now.

My friend, what exactly do you think is so energy intensive with LK99 synthesis? I've briefly taken a look and the process proposed is really not that onerous in terms of energy consumed. It is a matter of perfecting the process that is the hurdle, we already spend tons of energy happily in similar industrial processes.

> But the energy required to do this at scale will likely require our civilization to utilize orders of magnitude more energy

As opposed to smelting aluminum or steel? And that creates stuff that is dirt cheap in bulk...

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