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Comment by oriel | Hacker News Reader

Not related to the LK-99 claims.

This is a paper following on the "twistronics" magic angle (1.1 degree) research, exploiting the emergent moiré pattern and adding layers to build a "platform" for future development.

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I am curious if LK-99, though largely debunked, has given any researchers new avenues of investigation.

I commented on this during the LK-99 phenomenon.

> I'm looking forward to experiments with LK-99 and twistronics. What a time to be alive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36995560

But it seems LK-99 is a 1-dimensional material. Still, twistronics is a clear avenue of exploration for semis.

Speaking as someone who used to work in DFT (the computational side), the multiple interesting computational results showing band structures often associated with high-Tc superconductors seemed interesting. It's a long shot (because prediction via DFT, as opposed to explanation, is difficult to say the least), but if I was still in the field I would be searching the nearby material space for similar materials that both exhibit the interesting band structure, and also exhibit that structure in the most thermodynamically preferred state. To my understanding this was one of the issues with LK-99 - even though the computationalists found that possible band structure, it was thermodynamically disfavored vs another copper substitution that did not exhibit a similar band structure through DFT calcs.

That being said, even if you did find an interesting band structure with a viable thermodynamic pathway for material synthesis, it says nothing about whether it has a room temperature Tc or some lower Tc. But regardless, it could lead to the discovery of some interesting new high-Tc superconductors. Or nothing, since that's how DFT (and more broadly, basic research) goes.

I'll bet there are labs doing something similar to this now.

What does DFT stand for here, could you disambiguate please? Because I also do DFT but it stands for Design For Test (on microprocessors).

Density Functional Theory. It's the bread and butter of computational condensed matter physicists and materials science simulations, but are mostly used as simulation to validate experimental results, rarely are predictive.

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