Andrew McCalip demonstrates synthesis of LK99
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The best test would probably be to produce a Josephson junction and measure Shapiro steps at high frequency, that's something that cannot be explained by anything except a superconducting quantum material. As the sample is highly impure it could even be enough to irradiate it with a microwave source and measure the reflectivity / transmittance, there could even be intrinsic Josephson effect like in high Tc superconductors. Impossible to say though without knowing more details about the material.
I know the main researcher has brought forward a modified BCS theory that combines insulator-metal transition physics with superconductivity, no idea though what to make of that.
I think they mean it only appears on islands that are much longer than they are wide or high. I.E. I understand it as a geometric limitation on the form of the crystals they can make.
The theoretical stuff that got here implies it has d-wave symmetry, and so does the original paper.
I'm a bit skeptical how they even know it's the right material, getting the doping right seemed quite intricate so it would seem quite extraordinary that they can hit the right process after trying for a few days. Not saying they didn't, but so far I'm rather inclined to believe they just got a ferromagnetic metal flake (which is easy to get following the thermal annealing process they did, or even by banging the material up a bit as they seem to have done for getting it out of the synthesis tubes).
I am curious how one could confuse the two? One leads to repulsion, another to attraction.
I'm not even sure they reversed the magnet polarity in this video, it seems they just removed the magnet and put it back, so there's no way to rule out a ferromagnetic effect.
I'm not sure either if LK-99 is a type-II superconductor but I would believe so given the papers I've read. Type-II superconductors aren't perfect diamagnets, they allow magnetic flux to penetrate the superconductor once you hit the first critical field, these flux vortices then get pinned at sites of defects where the energy requirement for breaking the superconductivity is lowest. That's what keeps a type-II superconductor levitating over a magnet, a type I superconductor or perfect diamagnet wouldn't do that. Then again I have never seen how e.g. a tiny YBCO flake (high Tc type-II superconductor) would behave if you put it in a beaker and dragged a Neodym magnet below it, so who knows.
Plenty of things are magnetic dipoles or can be induced to become dipoles in the presence of a magnetic field. Ever played with iron filings and a magnet? Or a ferrofluid and a magnet?
[0] Assuming the dipole moment is constant.
We're not talking about a vaccine.
- batteries + touch screens => iPhone
- batteries got better => Tesla
- reinforced concrete => pretty much all the worlds buildings and bridges
- neodymium magnets + gyros => drones
A room temperature superconductor... well, that changes things on a completely new level. Order of magnitude smaller losses plus order of magnitude higher magnetic fields? OMFG can we build SciFi things from this if it pans out.
So yeah - we are in a hurry. If this pans out, there will be a massive shift in how pretty much anything is made. And the reward for the people who can figure it out first are insane, in terms of potential value created.
But think about it from a company/wealth creation perspective. Are you then really sure the correct course of action is to take it chill?
He understands how to market in the social media age.
But eastern competition is fierce, and the western world is mired in esg and bureaucracy.
Something is rotten at a general level, and if its not fixed soon, this trend of lagging behind will also start manifesting where it starts to hurt.
In my experience though, if he had made any effort to link those two things prior to doing this - e.g. by proposing this as an internally sponsored marketing stunt - it would probably have been rejected.
- using company resources, such as time, hardware, or office space, unless otherwise stated.
Clearly the case here, but my understanding of this law doesn’t align with how you described it.
They are still busy getting approvals from three layers of management and one group of lawyers.
I'm pushing back against academia because I think the system is pretty much a mess. Academics believe that we got all the nice technological innovation because of academia. I think it is despite academia. Most money going there is just wasted on writing not what you think is right but what you think will be published, waiting for peer review, and other bureaucracy. The main problem is that academia works with the belief that science needs to be rigorous since bad science might damage their reputation. However, this is how governments think, but not how scientists should think! Would the world be a better place if any new website, company, or YouTuber should be reviewed by peers first? No. Just like science, these are strong link problems [1].
[1] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...
The reason the Varda team even took this long is because they couldn’t get red phosphorus.
It’s very hard to redeem academia in this example.
It's a slow moving process, but it works.
If I was an academic working on this, I would be following the Sagan Standard and triple checking my results before claiming anything.
I think we are all suffering from 24 hour news cycles. The work in China and now Varda is very exciting but they are warp speed developments.
Instead of a few anonymous peer reviews, you get the entire planet to replicate. Moment you get something meaningful, publish it on arxiv. Quantity, not quality is king. Anomalies are drowned out by large samples. Questionable methods get mass debated in public.
Scientists are dependent on public funding, why squander the biggest moment in pop science for literal decades?
Now this won't work for 99.99% of research. But top tier research will probably get published on youtube and arxiv in the future...
- ordinary ppl more or less understand the importance of RTS
- a visible and understandable effect (Meissner) can be shown on successful replication
- the materials required are easier to understand, but the synthesis procedure is tricky, and purity is important
- The skills of chemists comes into play, leading to kind of a Breaking Bad feel
By people who don't know what they're talking about.
You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
This works just as well with less exciting tech, because the point is that we collaboratively learned how to build something.
NASA can't take risks and seriously innovate anymore because even intentional explosions will be passed off as failures, we all experienced the sheer madness of the covid years, similarly anything nuclear brings complete randos out of the woodworks claiming absurd things about its dangers.
Not having some amount of gatekeeping just lowers the bar too much and introduces so much more noise.
I can see how this would be a very controversial subject. Discouraging scientific participation? That's a tough pill to swallow without a lot of justification.
That's not really the case though is it? Doubting someone's credibility would simply mean ignoring their results. But withholding information is something else entirely.
When I mentioned gatekeeping I was specifically referring to how there's this formula that was kept secret since 1999. At some point the potential significance surely became apparent, and one of the only speculations I can come up with to justify that would be gatekeeping; keeping the information out of the hands of the filthy commoners for reasons.
Maybe it wasn't gatekeeping. If not I'd sure as heck like to know what it was.
So no withholding information at all. But on a more general level if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster. The reason we do science is because we are trying to understand things just posting your random results would just give everyone information overload, because you would know what to focus on. Lk99 is actually a great example, the material would have completely been ignored by most (maybe even has been, not sure if they published about it previously?) if not for these recent results. Moreover because the results were published before the authors were confident about what they had, they have been subject to lots of ridicule and accusations of fraud. It might turn out alright in this case, but something like this can be career ending if it turns out to just be an experimental error.
I really do hope it's something innocent like this.
> if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster.
I'm not sure it would be any worse than it already is. I don't see how we could achieve any more bombastic headlines than we already get.
However, what I think happened here is that they weren't able to work on it for a while, and if say, they didn't feel confident in their findings back in 1999 and only got around to being able to look at it again in 2017, it would make sense that their intent wasn't to gatekeep, it had just become one of those "we'll get around to testing it one day" type of projects everyone has. In this case it just potentially was a pretty massive thing to put off.
Was it withheld from the public? Eh... yes? Kind of? Because it was only ever published in a journal - probably Materials Letters, but this was a long time ago - that you would only have access to if you were a graduate (or ambitious undergraduate) student with plenty of time to read in a university library, or a specialist in the very narrow field that journal was for, somebody with a membership included subscription...
This isn't gatekeeping, this is, to be blunt, profit motivated hoarding by a handful of publishers in the academic journals business. And this is the thing that arXiv.org and other pre-print venues are actually having an impact on. I, for one, am strongly in favor of academic information being widely available. I'm not as much in favor of people who have not demonstrated their competencies in something that requires a great deal of both knowledge and skill feeling entitled to being given a platform for their (usually laughably clueless) proposals. If you've done enough work to have a tested hypothesis, that's different.
So I don't think asking about credentials or asking about references is gatekeeping. It's putting a statement into context. If I as a random asshole say "this isn't a superconductor" you as a reader should want to know where I'm getting that opinion from rather than just taking my statement at face value.
Edit: According to this it was just an unfortunate 19-year hiatus. (Yikes.) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248
> By people who don't know what they're talking about.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds all these public mass debaters disgusting.
Of course, we’re often working on a tool to help make tools for other scientists, so that sort of thing is hard to explain to the general public, but ultimately it should terminate in some results that actually have obvious value to society in general.
Does it mean that grant money are distributed by people who are unable to "assess most research"?
Peer review was never a substitute for replication in the first place. In this sense we've been "post-peer-review" the entire time.
The peer review system is broken but I think we still need some sort of structured system in addition to this “hey world, check this out!” method.
The reaction I've seen from most of the scientists has been pretty negative on the papers. The originals aren't strong papers. The chemistry has issues: https://nitter.net/Robert_Palgrave/status/168545015680691814... (unbalanced equations, starting materials have pretty different element ratios to final products). As for the main claim, note that LK-99 seems to be a poorer conductor than copper wire at room temperature: https://nitter.net/bedoya_pinto/status/1686848392616423425#m... which is the kind of thing that should really cause a record scratch and make everyone go "um, I think you did something wrong there"--it's something that absolutely would be caught in peer review.
There is no conclusive proof that this is a superconductor on the replications, but the evidence has been on a different level from nearly everything else you'll find on Arxiv since the beginning.
At monopolar magnetic fields weak enough to come from a permanent magnet is a lot rarer.
Almost all superconductor claims come from measuring magnetic resonance or direct resistance measurements. Both are noisy things to measure, and won't get you reliable results.
It also seems like it has at least pretty strong diamagnetism, which while not a demonstration of superconductivity is both somewhat interesting and gives a vivid demonstration that's amenable to social media.
"Top tier science" is already published on arXiv.
The future happened back in 1995 or something like that.
> Quantity, not quality is king.
No, quality is still king. We don't need videos of flakes standing on their end we need someone who has been working with superconductors all their lives who is competent enough to measure zero resistance across the sample. If one of the wild theories is right we need someone who actually knows how to prove it and not just sound like they're intelligent by talking about 1-d superconductors.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
At practice, anomalies are hyped into everybody's attention, and large samples are drowned out by lack of novelty. You don't need questionable methods to get bad results, you just need quantity.
All the things that are happening are great, and this may be an astonishing discovery. But don't put more certainty on it than it's warranted.
Notably, peer reviews typically don't involve reviewers trying to replicate the results. So we've essentially skipped peer review (at least temporarily) and went full speed ahead with the post-peer-review process.
No, this is a new face for peer review. Existing peer review processes have stagnated in the information age, possibly with good reason. There are a lot of advantages to more immediate review of papers and data, and also to bypassing the systems of qualifications presently used to choose who is a valid reviewer.
A twitter post isn't peer review, but it is a nice way of sharing part of the process. A video etc. will help others in their attempts to replicate.
Counterpoint: It's better that a lot of people know "Hey, we might be onto something interesting here" early on.
Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur.
If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
"A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous." https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/coul... (It's unclear to me whether this was before or after the HUST team published their video.)
I don't think it's so much "China good at science, everyone else shamefully bad," but that some institutions (including in China) are more risk-averse, because labs who're already working on something they expect to succeed are less likely to benefit from dropping it to try something unproven.
Usually, when the Chinese government is confronted with an unexpected development they want to suppress, the opposite happens: official spokespeople clam up, nobody has a statement ready, related keywords get censored more or less effectively on social media, until an official narrative is revealed that doesn't withstand further scrutiny but survives anyway because such scrutiny is censored as well.
So no, it's pretty much not the playbook they'd run if they were trying to discredit it.
- challenges in practical and reliable
manufacturing of LK-99
- challenges in engineering w/ LK-99
- challenges in finding better materials
than LK-99 using similar approaches
I hope for the same here in Germany. It's way past time we actually deal with the sorry state of science funding and academia in general across the Western world.
A bunch of professors belonging to a hastily formed academic committee are trying to monopolize the public debate, quibbling about errors in the arxiv paper and demanding that Lee & Kim turn over samples of LK-99 because the big-name professors are obviously too busy to make their own. It seems that their first priority is to avoid a repeat of the Hwang scandal than to touch any novel research.
Don't you think in those conditions it's at least a little bit reasonable to demand samples?
I and everybody else would love them to hand over the samples for external testing, but it’s their samples so they can do whatever they want with it, and the rest of the world just has to pound lanarkite while we wait.
I have a hunch that this might have something to do with the late professor Chair (Choi?) who came up with the idea back in the 90s, and whose last wish his disciples claim to be following. Chair was a sort of outcast in the superconductor research scene, and the methodology his disciples have been using are also, um, unorthodox at best. Someone might stand to lose a lot of credibility if the verdict goes one way or another. We know there's been tension even inside the team, as one of the three men named in the first paper was dropped from the second paper. At this stage, I'd be more concerned about these internal tensions and personal grudges than any attempt to manipulate the public at large.
They say they want to share samples after they get a peer reviewed paper published. That's not a weird position to be in. If it wasn't for the hype around this, they wouldn't be in this position.
Let the process play out like it normally does, and if none of the replication attempts pan out, they can provide the samples after the peer review. We'll still care about RTAPS even if it takes another year for a sample to be provided.
Wait for the peer reviewed paper if you are this concerned about it.
No. Because ultimately they don't owe anyone anything outside of the standard scientific process. They want to get the peer reviewed article published, and have stated that if people still want samples after that they will provide them.
Half of twitter shitposting about FLOAT THE ROCK and a bunch of curious scientists and engineers attempting to replicate this doesn't fundamentally change this equation. If it's a superconductor now, it'll be a superconductor in 6 months.
None of the media hype or unwashed masses treating this as science entertainment should significantly impact the process they are going through. Assuming they've got an RTAPS, they'll get the Nobel Prize regardless of whether or not they satisfy everyone's curiosity right this moment or a year from now. Assuming they don't have one, well, that'll get found out too.
And yet researchers in other countries managed to find the money this week. That would seem to point to a real relative weakness that's worth thinking about.
Whether it is the result of gatekeeping, bureaucracy, academic squabbling, or something else, a cranky (and hilarious) Russian did better, faster work in her kitchen. Even putting aside professional scientific dysfunction, that seems to indicate a strategic cranky kitchen chemist gap.
Well, the work is happening right now.
You seem to want to make it sound like impatient kids being unreasonable or something, which is a ridiculous read.
It is more a matter institutions becoming irrelevant because they literally can't keep up with their peers. Which brings me back to,
> Seems kind of stupid to do chemistry in your kitchen.
When the institutions in your country become incompetent, that's what you're left with.
The "successful" replications are partial. No one knows how to make a large enough sample of LK-99 that can be tested to definitely show superconductivity (or not) at room temp and ambient pressure.
IMO the most bullish research done yet is the theoretical research.
So they'll quietly slog away trying and retrying experiments, checking and rechecking their data before finally saying anything.
As we saw with other previous big things, like the first gravitational wave detection, they took some time to make sure that they were right.
I think that if it turns out to be real and national lab experiments prove that out, we'll be hearing rumors circulating within the field some time before an official announcement, just like how there were rumors about LIGO's detection circulating for a month before the announcement.
Check out her twitter for some real fun rants @iris_IGB
World first public replication
As much respect for her as I have & as much I’ve enjoyed watching this pan out, a U.S. DoE affiliated lab or other nation states’ equivalent likely did something in the same timeframe.
People working in those labs are unfathomably smart & talented.
I don't doubt that the people working in these labs are very smart and talented, perfectly capable of their own replication attempt. But would they rush to try replicating it immediately after the paper's publication?
https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685774956330635264#m
They won't publish a preprint on their version because they think it would be "unfair"!
https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1687020011548770304#m
Every post this person makes throws up more red flags. I have no idea why people believe any of their claims besides "haha anime girl"
She seemed to have problems with the efficiency of the original formula, which is why I believe she doesn't believe it's replication what she produced may in the end not be LK-99.
It seems like she's in the process of getting X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) done.
There has been several fake videos placed out there on the Internet.
There is a quote by jay-z I'll paraphrase
" Men lie
Women lie
But replicable science don't lie. "
The mixture of USSR tweets has patriotic Americans so ruffled that some can't see through their disbelief and rage.
Yes, it isn't replication, and the only proof that her modified substance does anything interesting is a photo of a single grain suspended inside a small tube. She hasn't written anything clarifying the process from her vague twitter thread, she hasn't posted a video showing the sample's behavior (which would be better than nothing), she hasn't shown any measurements, and when people ask for these things, she gives unconvincing excuses.
And yet every thread is full of people saying she was the first to replicate. The USSR tweets are a little eyerolling but not the main issue
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
Of course it could all be faked, but she is prima facie attaching real, professional identities to her claims.
That person’s twitter feed reads like the howlings and scribblings of someone in a manic depressive cycle. I’m a little surprised _anyone_ would take them seriously.
A better explanation for the slowness of the national laboratories is they their word will be taken more definitively on this issue than anyone else.
They are the ones with reputations and have to answer to critics in the private sector, amateur sector, and in Congress.
I think their slowness is an encouraging sign, it means LK99 isn't easily debunked.
It does show genuine scientific curiousity from Andrew and his team(they might just be along for the ride).
If more company bonding events could be live streamed/tweeted experimental replication attempts of novel compounds instead of happy hours.
The world would be a stranger place.
https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip
https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip
In Twitter the latest tweet I see is from July, in Nitter is 22 minutes ago. Additionally in Twitter I get 3 notices/popups that I need to close.
I just read until I hit the first popup, then I back out.
I'd downvote if I could.
A walled garden is a site that degrades significantly or is unavailable without an account, like Twitter. Anyone can view all of HN modulo dead comments without an account.
You can have a fully open source walled garden.
Today the misinformation and shitposting crap is impossible to avoid, the top comments are invariably random 8 dollar people (?) that add little to the discussion and porn bots / onlyfans all over the place.
On top of that it seems there might be a bias in the accounts that get selected for payouts and there is indeed quite the incentive for ragebait there.
Nitter let’s me see the content instantly.
"Elon bad! Twitter bad!" It's uninspired and tiring.
Same goes for Reddit.
“I don’t even own a TV!”
As for Reddit, is there another frontend?
Only works if you can resist the temptation to follow national news orgs, politics, etc. In my little niche, though, I essentially never see any of that, even less than one sees on HN. It's all just tech, AL/ML, space/rockets, startups, etc.
I surmise that to block such access by Nitter completely while keeping Twitter's own front ends open to the public, Twitter would need to be extensively re-factored on both the front and back ends, a goal that the organization may not be capable of successfully completing at this time, but is presumably working towards.
1. The synthesis process is much more complex than the original paper suggests. Every group except the original is unable to create a large piece of sufficient purity.
2. It seems like even with a pure sample, the entire structure might not be superconducting which leads it to tilt on one edge instead of completely floating. (Some call it a 1D superconductor, I’m a bit out of my depth here)
Should expect all these things to improve soon, but seems like a genuine breakthrough, not a fake or a dud’
If someone have seen theoretical papers explaining this and/or understands it, I'd love to know. Iris Alexandera posted link to some experimental paper [1] but I didn't understand the mechanism from it and it is very scarcely cited
A lot of them are simply trans and tired of dealing with constant harassment campaigns directed towards their gender identity. Of course they're wary about cooperations with people they don't intimately trust.
Sexual politics is tiring and pointless, honestly. With all the ad hominem bullshit and disingenuous positioning, no one is even trying to resolve it.
The culture around anime profile pictures is that you pick a character that you at least somewhat relate to - or used to in the past and embraced that.
For trans people that's usually a character that is at least in some way gender-bending - like being mistaken for the other sex by other characters or people unfamiliar with the franchise.
[1]: https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
Think it was in replies here, but not logged in to tell: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1684438158837153792
It just sounds stupid here, because even when all of us combine we only ever so slightly pass the "regional power" mark. And we know it.
Italians are convinced that Italy is the center of the world, with the best food, home of Rome, etc.
French are convinced that France is the center of the world, with the best food, home of Democracy, etc.
The British are convinced that Britain is the center of the world...although maybe not so convinced of the food :-P.
Germans, same thing.
Portugese same thing, but it's the "secret" version of Spain with better wine, better food, better beaches, etc.
Everybody has national pride. That's a good thing. You should be proud of the place where you live because it means you'll take care of it and wont' trash it.
A: [orders some chemicals]
B: God damn I love America
A: Hell of a thing, America
C: greatest country in the world
It's not really a problem, just surprised me.
/s
(a) it's an industrial lab. (b) if there's any optimism to be commended, it's that of the South Korean researchers who worked on this on-off for ~20 years.
(B) The Koreans will rightly get their Nobel if this pans out. But what McCalip has done could never happen in a place like, say, Europe. The people there just don’t have the fortitude (those that do come here!) for this kind of thing. America is rich with ambition and creating the future. Other places had their time and are just fossilized remains now. But fun to tour, especially when the people there dress up like their glorious ancestors that made them famous did. It’s fun to look at the past sometimes (but obviously not live in it!).
While it's true that the USA may not always be the first to every scientific discovery, what it is at the forefront of is global trends and driving forward progress in a multitude of arenas. Silicon Valley has single-handedly transformed the global tech landscape, with pioneering companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook leading the charge.
American universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford consistently rank among the top in the world, pushing the boundaries of research and innovation. The cultural sphere is heavily influenced by American trends as well. Hollywood and New York City define global standards in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle.
Also, America's economic is the largest globally, and has considerable influence in shaping global financial trends. And let's not forget the huge strides in space exploration, highlighted by NASA's momentous moon landing and Mars missions. I mean, even the Soviets got a man in space! And that was half a century ago! European astronauts have to hitch a ride on an American-made rocket to represent their nations.
So yeah, while there's always room for improvement, America's influence as a pace-setter, innovator, and leader on the global stage sets it apart. This isn’t just a “USA! USA!” chant, I have a seemingly never-ending list of criticisms of my country, but, in terms of advancing the human species, I would take the USA over literally any other country every single day of the week.
So yes, the US is quite good at research, but it’s not due to some intrinsic quality of the country any more than a billionaire’s ability to attract beautiful women is down to their good looks. The US is simply punching at its (very heavy) weight.
[0] Why is the US the richest country? It has a lot of arable land to support a large population. Most of the original settlers came from the previous richest country, and it was never colonized (or more precisely it was never decolonized) meaning that the wealth was not diverted away from the people like it was in most of the worlds countries. The real story here is how China has completely mismanaged all the opportunities it’s had, you can thank Mao for that.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and I'll fund all of their research projects."
How is this different than a tiny magnetized piece of iron ?
Are they saying this piece showing in the video will always float the same way regardless of orientation ?
Also would this effect still work with an electromagnet ?
The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
Magnetic dipoles in a magnetic field experience a torque, and if a little sliver of stuff experiences a torque trying to make it point a particular direction, this could easily overcome the force pulling it toward the magnet.
(The torque on a dipole is proportional to the applied field. The force is proportional to the gradient of the field. And the experimenters seem to be using a pretty big flat magnet or a big solenoid, close to the center, which is likely to have a fairly spatially constant field near the surface.)
I’m reminded of once holding a bar magnet in a small plasma testbed electromagnet. Small = a few feet long and maybe 2 feet across. (The big one across the room was about the size of a semi truck IIRC.). I naively expected the magnet to be pulled in toward the center. Nope, not so much, but it tried quite hard to twist itself in my hands.
I'm a graduate of the public school system in the US in a state that is not in the top 10-15 for education - my high school had a pretty impressive furnace. I'm too far removed to remember what it's maximum temperature was but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000C+
What is the point of making it if you can't prove that what you made is LK99?
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1000-Degree-High-temp...
This stuff is over my head (what I'm looking at, ramifications, etc)
I'm also confused because I see conflicting things (e.g. "room temperature" but video says "500C").
Also, is this real or fake? I've seen comments on both.
It's showing a sample of something that might be partially a superconductor (as in, one side of it might be superconducting and one side might not be). It's probably not a complete superconductor, since it would be floating if it was. Some people are saying it's a very weird magnet.
If it's a superconductor then this could be comparable in impact to the development of the transistor. As in, it won't change things overnight but in 50 years people will look back at it as the beginning of a new era of technology.
>I see conflicting things (e.g. "room temperature" but video says "500C").
I think the 500C refers to the manufacturing process, not the current temperature.
>Also, is this real or fake? I've seen comments on both.
The video is almost certainly real, but it may not show a superconductor. The risk isn't intentional fraud, it's just hard to tell with these small, impure samples.
I’d like to see this redone with a much finer grind and thorough mixing.
Didn’t Nile Red just get a ball mill?
Unfortunately such measurements are not enough for definitive conclusions, because all that they can show is that below some temperature the resistance becomes smaller than the error of the measuring equipment.
Moreover, because the samples obtained so far are extremely inhomogeneous, they do not show a definite transition temperature, which would have made superconductivity much more plausible.
In any case, the results obtained so far are enough for showing that it is worthwhile to invest time and money for developing a method of producing samples that are larger and more pure, because whatever they are, they must have unusual properties.
The best would be to develop a method for making monocrystals, because this material has an asymmetric crystal structure, which might have very anisotropic properties.
The most interesting properties of semiconductors could not be discovered during the first century after their discovery by Faraday, because they were not available as pure monocrystals. Only after the methods for growing pure crystals have been developed during WW2 (for radar diodes), it became possible to measure the intrinsic properties of the semiconductors and to design new devices using them, and then the semiconductor industry has grown exponentially.
With this kind of non-metallic superconductor, the problems may be similar.
I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this so I'm probably missing something
The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
Is there a good summary of which fields, and how, somewhere?
这应该还是材料的各向异性, 也就是它的准一维结构导致. 因为材料当中有一个固定晶相, 那个方向的抗磁性最强, 所以磁感线总会沿着这个方向走, 导致所有样品都是竖起来的.
This should be due to the anisotropy of the material, that is, its quasi-one-dimensional structure. Because there is a fixed crystal phase in the material, that direction has the strongest diamagnetism, so the magnetic field lines will always go along this direction, causing all The samples are all upright.
Of course this could explain why the sample doesn't lift off: it starts out with the superconducting direction at an angle to the magnetic field and relatively strong diamagnetism leading to a righting force until the two directions are nearly aligned and the diamagnetism is too weak to overcome gravity.
> If you were to cut off the part that isn't lifting, do you reckon the entirety of the floaty half would float? AKA is this semi-float thing a purity issue?
And Andrew responded [0]:
> We wanted to do rock surgery, but I was scared we would shatter our biggest piece. It definitely has a piece that isn't contributing lift.
I'm guessing once they've prepared more samples and had existing samples tested they'll break some into smaller parts to try and get a piece that floats independently.
[0] https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687408423179370497
https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687425301184393216
"Reaction looks like garbage. Very incomplete"
Unless, of course, the other end is attracting the magnet.
But that is out of my depth. I am still trying to wrap my head around a directional superconductor/resistor...
And will this be like my 90% efficient solar panels that I'm still waiting for?
That said, the fact that LK-99 has not been instantly debunked makes me somewhat hopeful that even ridiculously sloppy attempts like this did manage to create a bit of the crystal lattice that makes this material unique, and that, if indeed it does have superconducting properties, the manufacturing process won't be hard.