What is LK99?

It is a new material that has been synthesized by South Korean physicists that, according to them, is superconductive at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.

This would be a collosal scientific breakthrough if it can be replicated and confirmed. Other superconding materials only work at extremely cold temperatures or high pressures, making them extremely expensive and/or difficult to produce as well as impractical for widescale use.

The material itself is a lead based crystal, with some of the lead atoms replaced with copper atoms. This creates internal strain in the material that allows quantum tunneling of electrons through the material, resulting in the low resistance.

Because of some recent alleged scientific misconduct of another physicist working in this field, the scientific community has been a bit skeptical of the claims thus far. The author's originally submitted their findings to the most prestigious journals (Science/Nature) but they were not published there until they could be corroborated and replicated due to the ongoing controversy of the other physicist.

However, unlike other superconducting technologies, this material is relatively cheap and easy to produce so there are many ongoing attempts to try to replicate the results and we should get clarity soon either way whether this is truly a society changing technology, or another "too good to be true" headline.

LK-99 is a potential room-temperature superconductor. The Wikipedia article has a good overview, including how attempts to replicate the findings have so far failed.

Okay so batteries. When you push their abilities, they get hot. Why? They're not superconductors.

That heat is a problem at large scale.

Finding a reliable superconductor isn't impossible, but until recently finding one that can exist at ambient temperature and pressure has been impossible. Basically, preventing that heat problem has been impossible to achieve without seriously cold temps or seriously absurd pressures. Those conditions aren't great for large scale use on earth.

So, if this is legit, it's a big deal. The whole nature of power supply and consumption will become less problematic.

It is wild how many huge breakthroughs we are in the edge of. I'm not holding my breath, but this is... Huge.

A Korean team claims it's a ambient temperature supra conductor (it's been 100 years that material physicists have been looking for one) . If true it's a major discovery. Remember December 2019 when we heard about a new virus in Wuhan?

However,

It has been published on arxiv, where scientists share draft paper before final publication (so you get early results without loosing 2 years in review) meaning it hasn't been peer reviewed. We talk about a major discovery, not about one more paper about quantum nanodots or a yet an algorithm to classify galaxies by shape using machine learning. In general, these ones are kept secret until publication and front page of a big journal.

To my understanding, on the recent development, one team couldn't reproduce their experiment while another concluded that theoretically speaking LK99 could be superconducting

So basically, the 3 options are

• It's a it's a fraud (but why fraud with such a high buzz tittle?)

— Paper is over optimistic but LK99 has nice property and is a milestone on the way (but again why come with such a big claim?)

— It's really superconducting, and for some reasons they had to release an early preprint (may be another team was about to publish) which would be a major discovery