Superconductor claims spark investor frenzy, but scientists are
skeptical
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[August 04, 2023]
By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) - Last week, two papers by South Korean scientists made an
extraordinary claim that sparked a social media frenzy and pushed up
prices of some stocks in China and South Korea: the discovery of a
practical superconductor.
Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow with
no resistance, a property that would revolutionize power grids where
energy is lost in transmission as well as advance fields such as
computing chips, where electrical resistance acts as a speed limit.
The papers, which appeared on a website used by scientists to share
research before formal peer review and publication, spurred researchers
around the world - including in at least two U.S. national labs and
three Chinese universities - to take a closer look at the proposed
material.
Superconducting materials already exist in places like MRI machines for
medical imaging and some quantum computers, but only display their
superconducting properties at extremely low temperatures, making them
impractical for wide use.
The South Korean researchers last week said they found a superconductor
that works at room temperature, which has long been considered a holy
grail for scientists in the field.
The researchers also published a recipe for making the material - dubbed
LK-99 - which involves taking a relatively common mineral called lead
apatite and introducing a small number of copper atoms into it.
The South Korean researchers published two papers - one initial paper
with three authors and a second, more detailed paper with six authors
that included only two of the authors from the first paper. None of the
authors contacted by Reuters responded to a request for comment.
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Physicists interviewed by Reuters said the good news is that there is no
law of physics that says a room temperature superconductor cannot exist,
and the material described by the South Korean team is easy to grow,
meaning other researchers should be able to start getting results as
soon as this week.
The gold standard for proof of discovery is other labs reliably
replicating the South Korean researchers' findings.
Researchers from at least three Chinese universities have in recent days
said they produced versions of LK-99 with varying results. One team from
the Huazhong University of Science and Technology posted a video
purporting to show the material levitating over a magnet, which is
important because true superconductors can float over a magnet in any
orientation, without spinning like a compass.
But another team, from Qufu Normal University, said they did not observe
zero resistance, one of required characteristics of a superconductor. A
third, from the Southeast University in the eastern Chinese city of
Nanjing, said they measured zero resistance, but only at a temperature
of 110 Kelvin (-163 degree Celsius).
On Thursday, South Korean experts said they would set up a committee to
verify the claims.
Eric Toone, a scientist-turned investor at Bill Gates’ Breakthrough
Energy Ventures, said he is monitoring any peer review and reproduction
efforts by reputable labs.
"The measurements you need to verify or to demonstrate superconductivity
are very difficult to make," said Toone. "It's completely game changing
if it's right, but until we have more validation, we just have to be
patient."
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![](../images/080423PIX/news_j19.jpg)
A view shows one of the superconductor
coils which are assembled to form the giant magnet within which the
magnectic field is 11.7 T., the core component of the most powerful
MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner in the world to be used for
human brain imaging at the Neurospin facility of the CEA Saclay
Nuclear Research Centre near Paris, France, September 17, 2019.
Picture taken September 17, 2019. REUTERS/Thierry Chiarello/File
Photo
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2019/Sep/05/images/ads/current/stclara_lda_SPONSOR_090519.png)
'YOU CAN BE FOOLED'
The possible bad news for LK-99 is that the superconducting field is
full of materials that hold promise at first but fall apart under
scrutiny. Researchers even have a handy name for them - unidentified
superconducting objects.
"We call them USOs," said Mike Norman, a condensed matter physicist
at Argonne National Laboratory. "There's a long history of USOs
going a long way back, including some very famous people who thought
they had a superconductor and they didn't. It's like anything in
science - you can be fooled. Even good people can be fooled."
Norman said the original papers had problems. Some may have been
honest typographical mistakes from rushing to post the research, but
more troubling was a lack of data over a broad temperature range to
show how the material behaves when it is in a superconducting state
and when it is not.
"People often use that method to show how much of the sample is
actually a superconductor and how much of it is not," Norman said.
Other researchers have also found reasons for caution. Sinéad
Griffin, a solid-state physicist and staff scientist Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, used a U.S. Department of Energy
supercomputer to simulate the proposed material.
Griffin found that inserting copper atoms into lead apatite caused
the material's atoms to rearrange in an unexpected way that
resembles existing superconductors. But that effect depends on the
copper atoms going to a spot that they don't naturally want to go,
which could make it harder to produce the material in bulk
quantities.
Griffin cautioned that her simulation has limits - it cannot
conclusively prove that the material is a superconductor, and the
work assumed that researchers can place copper atoms into the lead
apatite with perfect precision. In the real world, that's unlikely
and could have a big effect on the material.
And even if LK-99 does turn out to be a room temperature
superconductor, it will still take time to determine how useful it
might be, said Michael Fuhrer, a professor of physics at Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia. For example, Fuhrer said no data
was provided on how much electrical current the material might be
able to carry and still be a superconductor, a key question for
improving power grids.
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Still, Fuhrer and other physicists said the results are worth
studying given all that remains unknown about superconductors and
the possibility that they could be discovered serendipitously in a
common material.
"There's lots and lots of minerals out there that we haven't looked
at yet," said Argonne's Norman. "And there's probably some very
interesting physics hiding in these minerals."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Joyce Lee in Seoul
and Brenda Goh in Shanghai, Krystal Hu in New York; editing by
Kenneth Li and Deepa Babington)
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