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Professor Philip Moriarty takes issue with a paper by scientists claiming to achieve room temperature superconductivity.

The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

Key critique points:

  • Team has little to no background in superconductivity
  • Evidence of levitation can be explained without superconductivity
  • Graph showing drop in resistance uses a scale which is orders of magnitude off the scale
  • Graph showing drop in resistance shows it does not drop (close) to zero

Phil regrets this bad publication which received so much attention could have a negative impact on credibility of science as a whole.

  • cyd@lemmy.world
    12·
    11 months ago

    It’s easy to get caught up in the negativity of the LK-99 claim being disproven, but I think there are many positive aspects of this affair that are worth pointing out.

    1. Multiple top labs, including some of the very best cond-mat groups in the world (e.g. Bernevig), were willing to spend time checking out the claim, even though the Korean group were mostly nobodies. People went in with an open mind, and were very calibrated and professional in their criticisms… even when the substance of the criticism was scientifically devastating, like the CAS preprint pointing out the role of Cu2S. This speaks to an egalitarianism in this scientific community that’s wonderful and worth celebrating.

    2. The fact that so many top groups were willing to check this out, on the off chance that LK-99 really was the real deal, demonstrates how real the possibilities are. We honestly don’t know if a room temperature and pressure superconductor is possible; LK-99 isn’t one, but it could very well be that tomorrow someone discovers one. Materials science still has lots of potential, and the dream is still alive!