When Sinéad Griffin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California had some new findings to share a couple of seemingly magical materials that has made customers of Twitter go gaga, she didn’t must do a lot to achieve a whole lot of consideration.
The uncommon materials, named LK-99, has been offered to the world as a superconductor that will carry electrical energy at room temperatures with zero resistance.
On Twitter — or X, as Elon Musk has renamed it — “LK-99” has been a trending matter in current days, and fans have hailed what they imagine to be a long-sought holy grail of physics, one that will remodel on a regular basis life with new applied sciences to unravel local weather change and make levitating trains commonplace.
On Monday night, Dr. Griffin let the social media world know of her findings in a brief put up that contained solely a hyperlink to her preliminary paper and an animated GIF of President Barack Obama dropping a microphone on the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2016.
The response was rhapsodic. The mic drop was interpreted by some X customers as affirmation that the holy grail had been discovered.
Dr. Griffin thus supplied one other twist in a curler coaster of pleasure and deflation that has enthralled LK-99 followers for greater than per week.
The saga began when a staff of South Korean scientists, most working for a tiny start-up firm named Quantum Energy Research Center in Seoul, posted two experiences that described their method for making LK-99 and the measurements that they mentioned confirmed the fabric’s superconducting prowess. (The title of the fabric comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the 12 months 1999, once they say they first synthesized LK-99.)
Most strikingly, they supplied a video displaying a small pattern partially levitating over a magnet. The levitation, the scientists mentioned, demonstrated the Meissner impact, which ensures zero magnetic area inside a superconductor.
Alex Kaplan, who had majored in physics at Princeton University, discovered about LK-99 on Hacker News, a news aggregation web site.
“I was just shocked,” Mr. Kaplan mentioned in an interview. “My jaw dropped to the floor, and I started calling every friend that I knew in physics.”
That night time, he shared his pleasure on Twitter.
With that tweet, which has acquired greater than 132,000 likes, Mr. Kaplan joined a bunch of LK-99 followers who propelled pleasure on social media over the previous week. Most of the fans usually are not specialists, nevertheless. Mr. Kaplan, for instance, works as the pinnacle of espresso product at Cometeer, an organization that sells flash-frozen espresso extract.
The scientists who examine superconductivity and strong state physics have been quieter. They recognize the curiosity — their work not often attracts a frenzy of public glee — however they’re puzzled as to why this specific room-temperature superconductor declare took off wildly whereas many earlier claims that didn’t show out got here and went with out fanfare.
“It’s great having public interest in solid state physics research,” Dr. Griffin mentioned, “with due caution of it being explained correctly and with the caveats I think that are needed for some of this discussion. But I think it’s fun.”
The skepticism stays, as a result of the information supplied by the Korean scientists up to now falls in need of being convincing, many specialists say.
“It is too soon to conclude anything about superconductivity,” mentioned Sankar Das Sarma, director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center on the University of Maryland. “That data is extremely suggestive, but it is by no means compelling.”
Dr. Das Sarma has posted commentary on the middle’s Twitter account. He identified, as an illustration, that on the temperature that Korean scientists declare LK-99 turns right into a superconductor, {the electrical} resistance drops, however to not zero. Indeed, the resistance of the fabric, made from the mineral apatite with a number of the lead atoms changed by copper, is about 100 instances greater than pure copper and different good conducting metals.
The levitation video can be not definitive, as a result of non-superconducting supplies together with graphite can even partially float in the identical approach.
Last weekend, Mr. Kaplan, who had kicked off a lot of the preliminary pleasure, posted a picture of a Magic 8 ball that learn, “It’s probably over.” Then he noticed Dr. Griffin’s paper.
In an interview, Dr. Griffin mentioned her paper, titled “Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-substituted lead phosphate apatite,” didn’t affirm the hype.
“I’m not describing superconductivity in these calculations, for sure,” she mentioned. Rather, her pc simulations present that the substitution of copper within the apatite did lead to an uncommon rearrangement of the atoms. The quantity of the mineral’s crystal construction really shrank barely. That in flip appeared to shift the digital construction to 1 that might be conducive to superconductivity.
The digital options, referred to as “flat bands,” seem much like what was noticed in high-temperature superconductors, a category of supplies found within the Nineteen Eighties. (The title — high-temperature superconductors — is considerably deceptive. They work at temperatures significantly hotter than had been noticed beforehand, however nonetheless colder than any naturally occurring place on Earth.)
The options might facilitate robust interactions between a whole lot of electrons, which might give rise to superconductivity — however not all the time.
Dr. Griffin concedes that the digital construction calculations are much less definitive than her findings in regards to the shrinkage of the crystal due to the huge variety of electrons concerned. “There are inherently lots of approximations that you have to make in doing this,” she mentioned. “It’s not a definitive calculation of what you measure in experiment.”
A gaggle of Chinese scientists posted a paper describing comparable calculations that discovered the same digital construction.
“I truly don’t get the excitement about her preprint,” mentioned Douglas Natelson, a professor of physics at Rice University in Houston. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that theorists and computational materials folks very often produce preprints based on the latest claimed material of interest. There’s nothing exceptional in that.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Griffin adopted up with an extended thread of tweets deflating the optimistic interpretations of the mic drop GIF.
The cycle of pleasure and deflation repeated later within the day when scientists at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, reported that that they had synthesized LK-99 and measured zero resistance in one of many samples.
However, the reported zero resistance occurred when the pattern was cooled to minus-260 levels Fahrenheit, not room temperatures, and it was a gradual diminishing {of electrical} resistance, not the sharp drop that will be anticipated of a superconductor. The knowledge additionally confirmed a resistance dip at greater temperatures, which the Southeast University scientists attributed to impurities or an instrumental glitch.
Dr. Das Sarma was once more unimpressed.
Like the unique LK-99 papers, “Southeast also has no transition, just instrumental artifacts,” he wrote in a tweet. “What is the goal here? No one can fool nature.”
Dr. Das Sarma mentioned he knew that the analysis teams of a number of outstanding physicists had been working to synthesize the fabric and make measurements to find out whether or not LK-99 is certainly a superconductor.
“A claim this huge has to be scrutinized very, very carefully,” Dr. Das Sarma mentioned. “And has to be duplicated by independent groups in as many ways as possible before we declare victory.”
He added, “I believe this can happen. But that does not mean this has happened.”
Source: www.nytimes.com