Peer review is great and all, but they have video. This is either real or outright fraud. I’m don’t know what they’d gain from fraud here, as this is such big news it will be replicated quickly.

This is published an ArXiv. That means it’s a manuscript that hasn’t passed peer review yet. There is a very real chance that the reviewers will find errors in the manuscript that change the interpretation of the data. In other words, I would take anything on ArXiv with a huge grain of salt

There was a recent ‘discovery’ that seems to have gone very quiet already this year, iirc the results couldn’t be reproduced. So I guess we have to wait and see if another team can reproduce these results. A line I found interesting was:

“The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure”

‘A slight volume shrinkage’ kinda sounds like the results of pressure to me? I’m not equipped to fully understand all the terms they use, but it sounds like they’ve found a way to apply pressure internally in the material, without using pressure in the environment.

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Something I’d like to point out is that this material is inherently hard to bring to high purity. It relies on a copper atom jumping into a higher energy configuration by chance which is not going to happen often since everything always tends towards the lowest energy configuration possible. Even if you wanted to make a low purity sample and refine it, the supposed material properties depend on the crystal structure, so you can’t melt it down, you can’t crush it and bring the powder back to a solid, it eludes most conventional ways of purifying a material.

If it’s real, we’re not going to see any mass production for a long time. It’ll be harder to mass produce than graphene by quite a bit, and we see how long that’s taking.