All that Andrew McCalip wished for his thirty fourth birthday was a cargo of purple phosphorus. It was a tricky request—the substance occurs to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is managed by the US Drug Enforcement Company—but in addition an important one, if McCalip was going to comprehend his dream of creating a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the subsequent week. It required 4 components, and to this point he had entry to a few.
His followers on X (that’s, Twitter, post-rebrand), provided concepts: He might soften down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or attempt to purchase it in pure type off Etsy, the place the DEA won’t be wanting. Others provided connections to Jap European suppliers. They had been deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had discovered a couple of potential superconductor known as LK-99 earlier that week by means of a publish on Hacker Information, which linked to an Arxiv preprint by which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, of their phrases, “opens a brand new period for humankind.” Now McCalip was amongst these racing to copy it.
Superconductivity—a set of properties by which electrical resistance drops to zero—usually seems solely beneath frigid or excessive strain situations. However the researchers claimed LK-99 exhibited these qualities at room temperature and atmospheric strain. Among the many proof: an obvious drop in resistance to zero at 400 Kelvin (127 levels Celsius) and a video of the fabric levitating above a magnet. The authors, led by Ji-Hoon Kim and Younger-Wan Kwon, proposed that this was the results of the Meissner impact, the expulsion of a magnetic area as a fabric crosses the edge of superconductivity. If that had been true, it might certainly result in a brand new period: resistanceless energy traces, sensible levitating trains, and highly effective quantum devices.
On X and Reddit, massive language fashions glided by the wayside. The brand new star was condensed matter physics. On-line betting markets had been spun up (the percentages: not significantly good). Anons with a surprisingly subtle data of digital band construction went to conflict with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an obvious resurgence of technological progress. Their mantra was seductive, and possibly somewhat reductive: a return to a time of leapfrogging discoveries—the lightbulb, the Manhattan Mission, the web—the place the influence of scientific discovery is tangible throughout the span of a human’s earthly presence. “We’re again,” as one X consumer put it.
Consultants are uncertain. A number of variations of the LK-99 paper have appeared on-line with inconsistent knowledge—reportedly the results of warring between the authors concerning the exact nature of the declare. The researchers aren’t well-known within the area, and their evaluation lacks primary checks usually used to substantiate superconductivity. Spurious claims are additionally so frequent within the area that physicists joke about USOs—“unidentified superconducting objects”—a play on UFOs. (Most up-to-date sighting: a room-temperature, high-pressure materials from a College of Rochester lab that has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and rigged knowledge.) There are extra doubtless explanations for the levitation, explains Richard Greene, a condensed matter physicist on the College of Maryland, together with magnetic properties within the compound in its regular, non-superconducting state. The betting markets in all probability had it proper: Odds are the brand new period will not be but upon us.
However the declare continues to be value testing, Greene provides. In his lengthy profession finding out superconductive supplies, he’s seen advances come from outsiders with puzzling papers that explored unfamiliar forms of compounds. That features, within the Eighties, a category of supplies that exhibited superconductivity above the boiling level of liquid nitrogen (–196 levels C), making means for all types of purposes, from magnetic resonance imagery to tokamaks for nuclear fusion. Plus, as a result of physicists perceive the mechanics of solely sure types of superconductivity, a seemingly unusual or inconsistent outcome can’t instantly be discounted. Maybe it’s simply one thing no one has seen earlier than.
