?? A new era of superconductivity?
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Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon: names that will either be in future textbooks or tarnished by scandal. Last Saturday they?published a paper on arXiv ?claiming to have discovered the world's first room-temperature ambient pressure superconductor, LK-99, a compound of lead, copper, phosphate and oxygen. A discovery that, if confirmed, would herald “a new era for humanity”.
When I was in high school I was lucky enough to play with early high-temperature superconductors, in this case a YBCO ceramic, chilled to a balmy -190oC or so by the liquid nitrogen I was pouring. It was magical to see the little disc levitate. In the decades since we’ve been able to develop superconductors that work at warmer temperatures (although not room temperature) but they also insist on extremely high pressures. If superconductivity becomes possible beyond these constraints, it will open up potential applications ranging from quantum computers to magnetically levitating trains. For a great explanation of why superconductivity matters,?Andrew Core’s tweets are worth reading .
However, the researchers’ claims will need to be independently verified before these possibilities can become a reality.1?Superconductor research has been rife with controversies. And the Internet has come alive with physicists and others pouring over and critiquing the paper,?prediction markets firing up ?(rather pessimistically), and researchers of different hues trying to replicate the results. Andrew McCalip is?live-tweeting his attempts to recreate LK-99 .
Regardless of whether LK-99 is a hoax or revolution, it has reminded me of the power of Twitter (or the Internet) at its best. A rushed pre-print paper straight to Arxiv. Pseudonymous Internet sleuths?digging into the background story , researchers collaborating to dissect the paper and thousands, millions of us following along with the replication experiments. We’ll know soon enough.?
The interest and excitement around LK-99 show that there is an appetite for real news about meaningful scientific breakthroughs, for passionate discussion that isn’t about culture wars or influencers. It’s a reminder of the power of collective intelligence, in which a web of scientists across different disciplines can pick up a discovery and analyse it from multiple angles, far faster than they ever could in the past.
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