Claims of revolutionary superconductor LK-99 are meeting resistance. Here's what you need to know
CBC
Limitless clean energy, portable MRIs, more efficient quantum computing — these are just a few of the breakthroughs that could be made possible by the discovery of a superconductor that works at room temperature.
"If you made a room-temperature superconductor tomorrow ... you'd be famous, you'd win the Nobel Prize," said Damian Pope, senior manager of scientific research at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont.
So it is no wonder that social media is abuzz with news of LK-99, a material that purportedly acts as a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperatures as high as 127 C. A photo of the material levitating over a magnet caught many people's attention, though experts have said this is no guarantee of superconductivity.
Meanwhile, researchers around the world, as well as some (ill-advised) amateur home scientists, are racing to replicate the results. So far, none have produced LK-99 and observed superconductivity.
This is only the most recent in a long line of claims about this "holy grail" of materials science, as Pope described it — which might explain why experts are approaching LK-99 with sentiments ranging from skepticism to cautious optimism.
"The public should be excited, but I think a certain amount of questioning is called for," said Alannah Hallas, a principal investigator at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
At the end of July, a team of researchers at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a startup in Seoul, published two papers that have not undergone peer review on arXiv (pronounced "archive"), a pre-print server where scientists frequently report preliminary results.
The papers described LK-99, a new copper-substituted lead apatite — a compound consisting of copper, lead, phosphorous and oxygen. It is named after two of the researchers who discovered it and the year they say they first synthesized it.
What is particularly exciting about this claim is the relative ease of synthesizing the material, Hallas told CBC News in an interview. According to the published methods, LK-99 was created through solid-state synthesis. She compared the process to baking, but simpler, "because there's no wet ingredients."
"You just mix together your powder reagents, and you use a mortar and pestle typically to homogenize them to get everything mixed up very well," said Hallas, who is also an assistant professor in UBC's physics and astronomy department. "Then you put it in the oven."
Experts also emphasized that the researchers haven't done anything incorrectly. It's common practice to upload preliminary findings to a pre-print server, especially when it's potentially a major breakthrough.
"If I believed that I had a room-temperature superconductor sitting in my lab ... I also would probably post it on [arXiv] as fast as humanly possible," Hallas said. "That is such a monumental discovery that could change the world ... and then the scientific process will work as the scientific process does."
A material must have two key properties to be considered a superconductor. Below some critical temperature, it must expel all magnetic fields, through what's known as the Meissner effect, and conduct electricity with zero resistance — meaning absolutely no energy is lost.
Hallas explained that at the atomic level, superconductors work because electrons pair up and stop behaving like electrons.
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