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LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

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Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#591

Post by IX-103 »

yreg wrote: post #575
epivosism wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the fact that everyone is trying to replicate the process rather than validate the existing material is very weird. Replication is hard, validation is much easier. If they've had this material for years, just send some off to a few labs... People claiming unusual abilities/etc usually focus on a very difficult ceremony/situation/feeling/process rather than the outcome. Ghosts, spiritual experiences, etc. really…

>little focus on just showing us the actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier, if it were true. I don't believe in the current alien thing, but how exactly would it be easier for a whistleblower to steal the actual wreckage out of some secret lab? Compared to giving a testimony?

How hard would it be to smuggle a cell phone to snap a picture? Don't build a false dichotomy.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#592

Post by IX-103 »

andersa wrote: post #337
nmwnmw wrote: post #267

Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to replication.

I'm really confused why everyone is claiming the replication would be easy. The paper specifies very large ranges for both times and temperatures that would take years to try all combinations, and ignores basically all of the details. The effect could be caused by some incredibly lucky contamination/impurities and then nobody would ever be able to reproduce it at all. Why not reverse engineer this one apparently work…

Because knowing what something is tells you less about how to get there than the paper does?

You can see the exact chemical structure of the material and still have no idea how to create it. Especially for composite materials like these where the junction of dissimilar materials gives rise to the desired behavior.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#593

Post by LargeTomato »

drtgh wrote: post #570
code51 wrote: post #500

Damn, why is nobody talking more about the theory of it? What I see to ponder: - (1970, brinkman, rice) "application of gutzwiller's variational method to the metal-insulator transition" - (2001, hyun-tak kim) "extension of the brinkman-rice picture and the mott transition" - (2002, hyun-tak kim) "extended brinkman-rice picture and its application to high-Tc superconductors" - (2021, hyun-tak kim) "Room-temperature-s…

By the rumors that I read in forums, Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim hit the first sample (the prototype of LK-99) in 1999 trying to prove the theory of their professor Choi Dong-Shik. Around 2017 YoungWan Kwon joined to the team and they got investment enough for to buy an SQUID and a EPR. In 2020, L and K hit with LK99. They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected. They contacted with HyunTak Kim after read…

>They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected

This should be "were rejected" because "were" refers to "they". It cannot refer to the paper even though that would make sense. You could say "but it was rejected" to force the sentence to refer to the singular paper.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#594

Post by lukeholder »

oceanplexian wrote: post #587
legi0nary wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand how a movie largely about the psychological horrors of developing and using a nuclear weapons is being construed to be "pro physics" lol. If anything it's the opposite

I was massively let down by Oppenheimer. It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in…

Hmm the “token” scene with Einstein was the pivotal interpersonal misunderstanding / paranoia trigger for the antagonist.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#595

Post by bradfox2 »

justinclift wrote: post #69
aqme28 wrote: post #6

Been following this very closely. Seems like the one takeaway is that whatever material this is, it's interesting. It's also difficult to synthesize in bulk, which is a shame because superconductivity is not easy to observe in non-bulk materials (think: powder). Note: I have a physics degree and a little bit of condensed matter experience, but nothing like anyone actually working in the field. Just some graduate cour…

Is there's no sintering or other process that could fuse the power together into a solid? (obviously without destroying its useful properties)

Paper mentions amorphous state plus an annealing step. Should be glass like at the end. If so, heat rates (up and down) of the last step are important and hardly mentioned.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#596

Post by godelski »

danbruc wrote: post #569
euazOn wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can rename, probably just trolling.

In this EEVBlog [1] thread they also conclude this after some confusion. [1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1555-lk99-ambient...

This does make sense then about the older (Cu substrate) video being higher resolution.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#597

Post by lucubratory »

drtgh wrote: post #570
code51 wrote: post #500

Damn, why is nobody talking more about the theory of it? What I see to ponder: - (1970, brinkman, rice) "application of gutzwiller's variational method to the metal-insulator transition" - (2001, hyun-tak kim) "extension of the brinkman-rice picture and the mott transition" - (2002, hyun-tak kim) "extended brinkman-rice picture and its application to high-Tc superconductors" - (2021, hyun-tak kim) "Room-temperature-s…

By the rumors that I read in forums, Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim hit the first sample (the prototype of LK-99) in 1999 trying to prove the theory of their professor Choi Dong-Shik. Around 2017 YoungWan Kwon joined to the team and they got investment enough for to buy an SQUID and a EPR. In 2020, L and K hit with LK99. They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected. They contacted with HyunTak Kim after read…

Important additional rumours I heard from a little birdie:

The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

Before Kwon joined the team at LG's alleged insistence, the reason that Lee and Kim had restarted research at all was because Choi Dong-Shik had summoned them to his deathbed, and his dying wish was that they prove his theory right; Lee and Kim judged that LK-99 was the best candidate for doing so. If true, that is objectively insane. Imagine if we actually get RTAPS because of an old professor's dying wish, like something out of a fairytale.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#598

Post by lucubratory »

cnhajzwgz wrote: post #100
alecst wrote: post #90

I’m not an expert, but I’ve used superconductors (I believe YBCO) when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors enjoy “flux pinning”, meaning wherever you put them on a magnet, they’ll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of constant flux.) In the LK-99 video tha…

Many experts are indeed questioning the apparent lack of flux pinning and wonder if it's just strong diamagnetism.

I've already seen some videos/images from the lesbian Soviet hedge chemist and some other amateur/non-lab repro attempts showing that if it's diamagnetism, it's much, much stronger than pyrolitic graphite. At least 15x stronger. Diamagnetism also wouldn't explain the resistivity, critical temp, critical current, and critical field graphs.

I think the realistic options at this point are:

1. Complete fraud, including opportunistic fraud by some online accounts who are faking partial replications. 2. Real superconductor of some kind, the papers are all fucked up because of the early leak by Kwon and internal Nobel jostling drama, and the production process is difficult, but fundamentally this is the real deal, RTAPS, but with a critical current and critical field that's lower than we would like, possibly (it's unclear what the measurements for these actually are). 3. They discovered a new type of material which is a very strong diamagnet, and then decided to fake the rest of a superconductor's properties because superconductivity is much more prestigious than a new powerful diamagnet. Replication efforts are having limited success with diamagnetism because it is actually diamagnetic.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#599

Post by lucubratory »

IX-103 wrote: post #591
yreg wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>little focus on just showing us the actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier, if it were true. I don't believe in the current alien thing, but how exactly would it be easier for a whistleblower to steal the actual wreckage out of some secret lab? Compared to giving a testimony?

How hard would it be to smuggle a cell phone to snap a picture? Don't build a false dichotomy.

Into and out of a facility for what are undoubtedly TS/SAP materials??? Would you like to go first?

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#600

Post by lucubratory »

once_inc wrote: post #310
nemo44x wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know they haven’t? The published papers were rushed (due to rogue ex-team member publishing one unauthorized) and they maybe weren’t ready. I’ve heard a rumor a team from MIT has travelled to Korea. Who knows right now.

I've heard those rumours as well, and also heard rumours that a sample was sent to a Chinese group.

CAS supposedly has a sample according to rumours amongst Chinese academics. They would certainly be logical to include in any sample dispersion, they're the closest very high quality/very high prestige institute.
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