https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
One might imagine, if this is true, it could be technologically useful in some ways, both beneficial or through accelerating mankind's technological progress, also creating various problems.
Certainly such a claim, requires better data to confirm, I would think, but if so this could be a Nobel prize. Otherwise, to explain the data they do have (unless the data is fake) could also require some interesting physics, and it still might have some ultimate applications.
29 comments:
It is totally false, the magnetization curves are wrong, the levitation looks like the Lenz effect (A piece of metal next to a magnet can still have a magnetic field when the metal or magnet is moving), the paper is horribly written. It also looks like the same issues people see all the time when non low temp people try to look at transport. Room temperature superconductors are discovered all the time in labs when the leads no longer conduct. These kind of things happen every few years. Any room temp superconductor would have to be type-II and you can easily put it in a magnetic field. It is not a superconductor.
Think about if a room temperature superconductor was ever found it will have 100 people on it with all the measures. Think about it your some non superconducting group and you see something that looks like a room temp superconductor, the first thing I would do is take it to a nearby low-temp/superconductor lab and have them also do some measures. You are still going to get most of the credit if it is real and not look like an idiot if they say, "you leads are bad".
Here is funny idea I heard about this. In congress today they had some UFO hearings,
so maybe they are getting us ready for the big reveal such as room temp superconductors, or the Harvard orbs found in the ocean. I just have a hard time with UFO tech using lead and Iron.
"Otherwise, to explain the data they do have (unless the data is fake) could also require some interesting physics, and it still might have some ultimate applications."
The Lenz effect, and bad contacts.
You are done no new physics, this exact thing has happened about 10 times before. You need to have some clue about superconductors before you do these kinds of measures. It is always the same a non-superconducting or non-solid state group for whatever reason tries to do some transport measures, the contacts do not work (some of this is harder than you think) and they say, hey zero resistance! They than take metal next to a large magnet and see some strange stuff, and say but our sample is not a magnetic so it must be a superconductor! (You can levitate a frog with a magnet, and it is not superconductor). Same pattern every time, no one ever learns.
Here’s what a superconductivity expert, Professor Jorge Hirsch at University of California at San Diego said today about the new paper: ‘It’s not superconductivity. It’s experimental artifacts, wishful thinking and poor judgment (in the best scenario).’
7/26/2023 6:20 PM
I do not think the Korean work is academic fraud since these exact same experimental artifacts have come up time and time again. It is just bad science and no willingness to talk to experts in superconductivity or even semiconductors.
However there is another case of room temperature superconductor but at high pressure which is probably fraud. This is just from this week.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2
A very disturbing picture’: another retraction imminent for controversial physicist
Ranga Dias will have a second paper revoked. A journal’s investigation found apparent data fabrication.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retraction-physics.html
Yes, I agree with those critiques and am also aware of similar things happening, as you say many times in the past. The trouble is, if someone did find some novel high temperature effects (superconductivity or not) the results might look like some sort of garbage due to sample quality or other issues. The idea of having some sort of copper and lead compound (with some odd disorder) does not seem completely crazy at least to me, so at the very least it might be admirable that they tried something "crazy but not completely crazy".
In particular it would be too bad if this fails and discourages others from producing novel results, just because they disclosed it in a careless way. We should be asking instead, why someone with a novel result, does not have resources to examine it, or is so scared of losing credit, that they cannot talk to someone who is perhaps more informed. And of course, other questions like that.
Theorists also tell stories of course, where nobody will do an innovative experiment, they try to find someone, and in the end they find someone who is interested but is unwilling to do it, since other people with labs know of the idea, and might be first!
Meanwhile of course, money will pour into established areas, for example in some ways this work has more merit from an innovation point of view, than taking endless measurements on existing superconductors, for at least it is a new material, making even a negative result of value -- of course, another question might be, why negative results are held to be so worthless and everything wants to be billed as a breakthrough.
Something like this happened in Cold Fusion as you know, without getting into the details -- there are many books and articles and a vast literature now relating to what happened and the aftermath, and of course, nobody has demonstrated anything "reproducible" at all, such as a model system anyone can set up that shows any significant effect whatsoever relating to the original claims. In fact our government has funded through ARPA-E a program to look into it, which is going on right now, and finding such a system is one of their stated goals.
7/27/2023 10:30 AM
Great post, lots of good points.
"The trouble is, if someone did find some novel high temperature effects (superconductivity or not) the results might look like some sort of garbage due to sample quality or other issues."
This is my thought. If a room temperature superconductor is ever found and it is like a regular superconductor with the condensation of Cooper pairs, it probably going to be very hard to see since the creep at room temperature would be so high you would see a voltage down to very low currents. Any flux expulsion would also be strongly reduced. You could have some kind condensation but it would have a lot of fluctuations on top of it at room temp.
However all sorts of things are possible in the world so who knows.
To be clear this is not any kind of career ender for these people. One guy is a sample grower, he has no controll over what people do with the sample he just grows it. No one will blame this person is this is bs. As for the other guys I suspect they are not superconductor people and anyone in the field knows theae measures are much more harder than it seems. Some people think you grab a voltmeter and if goes to zero you have a superconductor. No it is not like that at all. As Jorge says they are very guilty of wishful thinking but I am not going to get too much on their case for thinking they have something. What you may not know is this happens more than people think they just figure it out before they put a preprint on the archive. Also they put the preprint out hopefully for people to tell them the issues.
In any case if some ever does find a room temperature superconductor the paper will have 100 people on. If you have sample that could be room temp superconductor just go to a group that studies superdoncotors, they will check pretty rapidly. Sure you may have share a bit of the glory if it is real but at least you will not look like a fool if you throw it out to the world without checking.
The Rochester case on the other hand looks very shady.
I did read about cold fusion in that the whole field got a bad name because of the Utah study even though there is probably interesting science in these samples. Probably just chemistry but the chemistry itself is also probably also interesting.
I’m pretty sure they can use this latest high temperature superconductor to enhance the performance of NIF. All they need is another $10B and 10 years to save the planet.
One of the most interesting things in the Cold Fusion saga was that Julian Schwinger, tried to publish some speculative papers in the APS journals, he was a Nobel Laureate, and when they rejected them he attacked them for not being real scientists and resigned from APS, as I recall.
He claimed among other things that there were suppressing academic freedom. For example he claimed that it was normal to assume something was true, speculate on what signs you would see if it was, and then suggest experiments, in a normal scientific method as it were. But he was not allowed to do that, by the journal, since it was known to be false.
Of course, as you know in other areas that have become politicized, sometimes it is necessary or desirable to not really discuss the evidence for and against, and this might lead someone to view something like ozone depletion as unsettled. There is certainly overwhelming evidence on one side there, as you know.
As you know with the internet, it is now the case, that the situation is different, and there is no barrier to making your ideas public as was done, for example, in preprint form as in arxiv. While there is evidently a submission process and some vetting there, as you can see it seems to be a bit like holding a press conference that happened famously in Cold Fusion.
And when this fails of course, there is the fact that everything is easily accessible on the internet, and if not searchable due to censorship, generally often can be easily found, in fact censorship can just create communities that exist to share whatever was censored.
And certainly something we saw in COVID was that there were vast numbers of papers showing effects for things like ivermectin, and hydrochloroquine, although there were also careful studies held to be definitive completely refuting these, and also showing (perhaps) that they worsened the disease rather than made it better.
This is pretty much dead now, the papers have tons of flaws and makes little sense. It looks like a diamagnetic material to me.
From Prof Natelson at Rice on his blog. You can see he also has rather cynical view of other science communicators.
Then there is the claim via preprints (here, here) of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in a lead oxide compound from investigators in Korea. Cutting to the chase: it is very unlikely, in my view, that this pans out, for multiple reasons. Extraordinary claims hardly ever hold up. There are multiple weird issues with the data in the figures (e.g., magnetic susceptibility data that shows up in both papers with the same units but axes that differ in magnitude by a factor of 7000 - which numbers are reliable, if either? Resistivity that seem bizarrely large (0.01 Ohm-cm is bigger than the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit - again, are the units right?). A specific heat that doesn’t reach 3R at high temperatures. Not clear of the resistance is really zero in the nominally superconducting part of the V-I curves.). That said, if the video and the not-crazy-scale susceptibility data are trustworthy, this stuff is very diamagnetic, more so than graphite, which is quite unusual. At least the authors do provide a comparatively straightforward synthesis recipe, so replication attempts should clear this up in a week or two.
None of this is thaaaaaaat unusual, by the way. There are claims of weird superconductivity at some rate. It’s easy to screw up measurements, especially in inhomogeneous materials. Unfortunately, social media (esp the site formerly known as twitter) drastically amplifies this stuff. I assume Michio Kaku is going to be on tv any second now talking about how this will change the world. Hopefully responsible journalists will be effective at pointing out that a non-reviewed preprint on the arxiv is not conclusive.
I've noticed sometimes people in Japan are willing to pursue some of these issues in materials synthesis and characterizing materials in a very systematic and long-term way (i.e. sort of like organic chemistry for the Germans perhaps). One weakness of our system seems to be that a lot of projects are short-term in nature, and there is a jump to conclusions.
Schwinger even mentioned this I believe, he said the answers for cold fusion would come from the east and not the west, and indeed there are or have been extensive programs there, some sponsored by large companies such as I believe, Mitsubishi or Honda.
There are various claims surrounding this, but as you know Google did a careful study recently and found nothing at all -- it was published in Nature, and was hailed as some sort of breakthrough, as it supposedly gave the green light for journals to publish studies of this nature.
Of course muon catalyzed fusion is real (using accelerators to create muons and drive an exothermic reaction). NASA proposed recently another process where accelerators somehow drive the Oppenheimer-Phillips reaction, and the conditions might be such to imagine somehow the end result is a viable power source.
Somebody at Lawerence Berkley did some calculations that find some plausibly. The problem is you can always dream up some random theory.
We are 7 days into this, we would have known by now.
What if one of the replication attempts for the superconductor succeeds, or someone produces a theory paper that eventually leads to success on another material? In that case it might be that posting to Arxiv poorly substantiated results, was actually a good strategy for the people involved. Science certainly does have a herd mentality as you know, which means things are either ignored or everyone gets on a bandwagon.
I haven't closely followed this, but it seems a lot of the replication attempts did not find levitation or diamagnetism, but at least a few did. So there is an actual material that has at least those claimed properties -- this means most of the replication attempts are not meaningful or relevant, since they failed to produce the actual material.
As for superconductivity, in the successful replications, I haven't seen proof of that, but again it's hard to follow. It could be just a material with strong diamagnetism and perhaps some odd physics. In that case, maybe further investigation of related materials would lead somewhere.
It could also be of course, that the part of these samples with any diamagnetism, is not related to the claimed structure or composition. There is some story about a broken quartz sample holder, and all that, and various methods to make the material have seemingly given various results.
As for theory, I haven't looked at that, it is certainly remarkable that some of these theory papers are being produced so rapidly, a testament to the productivity of the people involved and the computer codes that exist, and the automation thereof in some of these. But generally I would expect, things are worked out over time once more experimental data becomes available, and this is perhaps a very hard problem.
I guess, it might be a great time to invest in lead, for there could be a big future market, I wonder where the deposits are and how much might be produced? If it is found in association with other metals too, it could cause their prices to decline one might imagine. And how would you make wire with such an apparently powdery and hard to produce compound, does it absorb water, can it be deposited in thin films, and is it a practical material at all if it really superconducts? Would we need to change any laws or regulations concerning the use of lead, or lead recycling?
8/02/2023 12:14 PM
I am still on the doubtful side of things. ANL is working on it along with several other DOE labs. After the first report of high Tc in 1986, is was confirmed a very short time after and at much at much higher temperatures and clearer signals. So far nothing like that for this sample. The issue is a lot of labs are working on it and so far 3 kinda of positive results have been found but if you have 100 groups and 3 groups find something and 97 do not and report nothing you only hear about three that do. Remember this could be a big Noble prize kind of thing, there are people working really hard to find something, my guess is even after just a a few days somebody would have found something big. To be clear everybody wants it to work but we have been through this before.
I certainly agree it perhaps doesn't look real based on the evidence, however have a strong feeling it is. After all, the experts are wrong on so many things these days...
As for lead, there does not seem to be any shortage of it, and certainly anything fabricated would be recycled, in fact as much lead is already recycled now.
I'd be looking into how to make wires or films of this, grow single crystals, or fabricate it in useful form. Also if the real material has some sort of disorder relating to where the copper or other dopant atoms are located, it is possible that disorder rather than the crystal structure, is what controls some of the properties, and it could vary depending on the means of sample preparation or annealing.
So it could be this is controversial for some time, or requires a great deal of work to understand -- obviously the many efforts going on in parallel now would help.
There could also be of course, a variety of analogous materials that have related electronic and structural properties, for example using other elements instead of copper, or schemes with more than one dopant, arsenic instead of phosphorous, and so on. One might assume based on previous materials, that the first material of this class were it to have desirable properties, may not be the best.
Certainly also getting rid of the lead might be desirable as although lead is cheap there are obvious issues there, something like tin or bismuth would be better if you could do that.
"I certainly agree it perhaps doesn't look real based on the evidence, however have a strong feeling it is."
I do not think it is real but I find it fun and I hope it is correct but my feeling it is not real. In fact there is web page that gives the updates on the current studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99
"The name of the metal is LK-99. It is a cutting edge ambient pressure room temperature super conductor. It has both huge military and civilian applications. And that's not even the best part, John, you can make it in your oven at home. Use drugs, go crazy, burn money....
we just leveled up the world, energy is free now, quantum computers are now room temp, giant magnets will detect even little bit of cancer before it can grow, a huge MRI, CT scant will be just standard physical every year,...we will live forever, use all the energy want and live in quantum computer AI all because of LK-99"
It is crap, not real. It seems like fun until you see people invest millions in this BS.
LLNL/LANL need to get into this NOW, we need computers, we need quantum computers, LK-99 gives us quantum computers...nuf said. Let the billions flow....flow, FLOW!
Tornados, sharks....shakrnado...nuf said.
8/03/2023 6:00 PM
Before you get on the case of the 6.00 PM poster I have seen serval news articles, blogs posts and podcasts essentially sayin the same things. There are several startup and American superconductor stock jumped from 10 to 16 dollars a share. It is now trading below 10 dollars again. However if I was say a unethical l scientist scientists I would by a million in this or some other superconductor
company say I reproduced it and cash out before people figure out what is going on. Hmm this gives me some ideas for Fusion. Mayne NIF can start having stock options. In any case the fact that American superconductor stock has fallen below the pre LK-99 preprint kinda gives away what the people in the know think about this.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-semiconductor-stock-skyrockets-67-4-cb229451
Well a pump and dump scheme would be illegal -- in fact you might be able to legally short it though, or use options to bet against it, based on your scientific judgement. The stock market is set up so that you get paid for your opinion, as it provides a means to efficiently allocate capital. The labs would also have some ethics office too, or something like that, which might have some constraints, or give you advice. I would assume too that even if the discovery is real any particular company might not benefit, but the stock could still take off.
The actual companies that make a lot of superconducting wire and equipment seem to be large companies in Japan, actually, who make many other things, and have the industrial expertise for this but you might find some pure plays on this idea if you look around.
I agree by the way it is not real, of course, evidently, except that it might well turn out to be. And other people as you know, have seemingly done the illegal thing you've suggested which may be of course, legal in the jurisdiction where they are domiciled. Placing bets on the assumption that someone else might do something of this illegal nature, if you are not involved in any way, could be legal one might suppose although this does not constitute legal advice.
American Superconductor had some issues with IP theft by the Chinese a number of years back:
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/09/599557634/it-was-a-company-with-a-lot-of-promise-then-a-chinese-customer-stole-its-technol
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwi/pr/chinese-company-sinovel-wind-group-convicted-theft-trade-secrets
By the way liquid nitrogen is quite cheap and still there are few applications for high temperature superconductors it seems. It seems to be something that has endless funding though for some reason by the government. Sort of like string theory most people in industry ignore it. I don't think that superconductor company even makes money for example, in terms of real world products, unlike companies which sell beer for example. The business of making aluminum beer cans and recycling them is probably a lot more significant economically in fact, than superconducting wire or devices.
Show me the money.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Superconductor-Mania-Sends-Korean-Tech-Stocks-Sky-High.html
Superconductor Mania Sends Korean Tech Stocks Sky-High
Late Wednesday, the Korean Exchange warned investors about speculative trading in superconductor-related stocks following claims of a technological breakthrough that could revolutionize the energy industry.
On Thursday, small-cap stocks such as Duksung Co. and Sunam Co. surged as much as their 30% daily limits for their third consecutive session. Sunam has jumped 220% in the last eight sessions, while Duksung has increased 165%. Mobiis Co. and Shinsung Delta Tech Co. have risen by 125% and 107%, respectively.
I looked a bit more at the three levitation videos. I think I know what is going on. These are not even diagrammatic materials but they just charged the objects and lifts like you hair does. Why do I believe this (1) In all three groups that see this the material never levitates but has part of it stuck to the floor or magnetic to keep the contact. In one video it even falls flat for a second which would be due a discharge event. (2) It looks like they are using electromagnetic not bar magnets so they have to shove charge into the system to make the magnetic work and the charge creates an electric as well as magnetic field, if there materials are also charged you get a repulsion. (3) Two of the demonstrates which did have a glass plate but also had very small flakes materials while the larger sample did not have the glass plate. Make a better insulator or spay some water around and I bet this all goes away.
Not looking good. I think we can call this a bust.
It makes sense to wait until all the various efforts have time to go through peer review and be published (or rejected), I think, I am going to reserve judgement at least until that happens.
I think, I am going to reserve judgement at least until that happens.
8/09/2023 2:35 PM
I think I will stick with what I thought when I first read the paper in July. It is junk. I read the two papers an hour after they got posted and knew they where wrong, the plots did not make sense, the levitation did not look like the Meisner effect. The IV curves look way to sharp especially something at room temp. Again this has happened before. The more you looked up the researchers groups and companies the more fishy it looked. Nobody in the field ever it took it seriously. I though it was a bit fun to see people get excited by this even if it was almost for certain wrong. Enough groups have debunked this.
11:31 -- yes I respect your expertise, of course.
It's just that at least for myself my interest has waned, too, and in any case I'm not a referee for those papers and never had an interest in finding each and every problem.
Some groups as you know, do claim partial replication or various results, and there are very good replication efforts that show nothing. Some of the original authors are also claiming that they have evidence not in the paper and so on.
That's why it would be good to see refereed publications (including any negative results, hopefully effort will go into writing those up) from anyone who wishes to do so.
Reserve judgement of course -- that means for anyone who's interested but doesn't believe it, they can put it on the back burner and come back in a few months and find out what the current status is.
And this is why the negative results are so important too, otherwise there would be a flood of positive publications, like in Cold Fusion, or arguably for hydrochloroquine and ivermectin during COVID.
8/10/2023 10:33 AM
Just some information. I have noticed non-scientists really get the wrong idea about "peer reviewed" publication. Just because something is published does not make it correct. All sorts of stuff gets published that is wrong, everybody in science knows this. What happens is two people get paper to review, the odds that both referees can get it wrong is actually pretty high, like 10% or so. Also depending the the quality of the journal, the referee may think, well this looks wrong but if it published in this and this journal even it gets published so big deal. Other times it could one referee says yes, the other says they have doubts and the editor just publishes it. Another thing is the standard for publications also depends on the field and the standards can vary widely from field to field. There is actually a jounral on paranormal phenomena, they even have referees, just because something is published in that jounral there is no reason to take it seriously. In the social sciences and humanities they have all sorts of weird journals and bizarre standards for publication. Also there are so many journals of dubious quality that almost anything could be published if one is willing to take to the time write it up.
Things are not concurred settled until there are multiple studies or many publications. Even in the case of gravity waves, the discovery paper was one paper but there had been hundreds of published before hand on by the collaboration on how they detect things, instrumentation and so on.
In the case of LK99, anyone with any knowledge in the field knows the plots look wrong. As for your partial replications, it was for partial levitation effect but these effects never looked like the Meissner effect but like diamagnet or ferromagnet. The only reason to work on is because the original authors are taking a risk and they where not complete crackpots from their past record so maybe they did have something and the payoff could be huge, even if nobody credible ever really believed this.
Another thing most of these studies on LK99 are going to be published they will simply be reported, it is not worth the effort to write up negative results that at this point could only be published in low level journals. A couple of groups will publish something most will not. The original papers form the authors will not be published either at least not a reasonable journal. In the case of cold fusion which was before the internet some papers got published with mostly negative results but now we can just say over the internet the results are negative.
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