I think that there's no reason to assume that negative results right now are conclusive, whereas positive results are strongly indicative.
My reading of the situation was that they have been making this stuff for quite a while (years!), but haven't had the funding or manufacturing expertise to start scaling up and properly improving the process. They are a tiny research lab. The suggestion seems to be that one newer (now former) member of the lab just thought F-this we need to publish, get it out there and start moving forward.
If it is real, the level of investment in finding ways to make this stuff is going to explode. It may be hard to make, but that won't stop us from finding a way to make it on a large scale if it truly is revolutionary.
Further to that, from other groups studying it we will potentially find better and easer to make alternatives.
The 99 in the name comes from the date the lab was formed, 1999. Some sources suggest that they have been studying this exact material since 1999, although I don't think that is confirmed.
I think it's safe to assume that they would have been making it for at least 1-2 years before the rejected Nature paper, although potentially significantly longer than that.
So they have been making it somewhere between 4 and 24 years...
Looking at how small the fragments are that other lambs are creating, I assume it's taken them years to get to the point that they can make larger lumps of the stuff that have any sort of uniform structure.
They seem to have been trying to perfect it before publishing.
> The name of the material comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the year 1999, when they say they first synthesized LK-99.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/science/lk-99-superconduc...
If I baked a cake once 23 years ago and once yesterday, I can't really say I've been baking for 23 years.
It’s called LK-99 as it was discovered in 1999.
Katalin Karikó was working on mRNA vaccine technology for decades on a relatively tiny budget, and was turned down by many larger groups based on the supposed impossibility of the concept.
You have to wonder how many future technologies are languishing right now in some basement lab where a couple of frustrated scientists are making do with a shoestring budget and are desperate to get their research published.
There is nothing 2-dimensional about the Apatite structure, and the preprints I have seen do not show any kind of “quasi two-dimensional” structure. If anything, it’s more like an array of tubes and chains, more 1D than 2D. Do you have a source making this claim?
First, you’re not talking about synthesis anymore. And if you try to grow a single crystal, how easy it is to get polycrystals from powder is not really relevant. Ease to synthesise and ease to assemble are very different things and both are controlled by different phenomena.
Also, again, not really. Graphene is quasi 2-dimensional and very easy to bunch up and form graphite, for example. Boron nitride, not that much.
> For 3D material you could probably just grind your impure sample down into a powder, isolate the grains that levitate, and press them back together.
You can do something like that (hot or cold pressing), but it still requires the right material to be synthesised in the first place. It works more or less well depending on chemistry and physical properties, not dimensionality.
Separating “grains that work” and “grains that don’t” is not something we really do when we create materials. It sounds more like QA in semiconductors than something we’d do in a lab.
> That wouldn't preserve structures in 2D though, let alone 1D.
Why not? If you grind a 2-D structure joint you just get flat grains. How well they assemble depends on their properties.
The whole discussion is not very productive: however truthy it sounds, dimensionality does not control how easy it is to synthesise a material. Apatites are very easy to make. Things like chalcogenide glasses are easy to make despite having a 1-dimensional structure at the atomic scale. There are many other examples. And, also again: it does not matter because apatites are fully 3-d structures, with linear elements if you squint and ignore how these elements are placed in the overall structure.
Superconductivity in LK-99 moves along a similarly anisotropic two-dimensional plane.
Outside of that, positive results only weakly imply LK-99 is real.
Hey, what does this actually mean? Like, space is 3D and I don't think you're claiming all LK99 samples are all literally-one-atom-thick, so clearly it's a 3D object.
I'd guess it means that the material has very regular layers, but (much like graphene) I've never actually seen someone directly say what "two-dimensional material" means 3-dimensionally.
Some more complex materials do not have this symmetry, and the ability of the electrons to tunnel is much stronger in some directions than others. In many known high temperature superconductors electrons are more or less confined to move in a 2d plane (even though a lump of the material is obviously a 3d object) so they are called "quasi-2d".
In other materials they are confined to move in only one direction, which seems to be the case with LK-99