Could Chinese team’s viral LK-99 video offer clue to superconductor holy grail for physicists?
- Student duo at Wuhan science and technology university posts video showing replicated LK-99 superconductor crystal created by Korean team days before
- As social media users hail the potential launch of a new industrial revolution, scepticism rules among mainstream physicists
Their nearly four-minute video was posted online on Tuesday afternoon and racked up millions of views overnight. By Wednesday evening, it was the second most-watched video on Bilibili – China’s answer to YouTube.
The team from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) synthesised a tiny crystal – just micrometres in diameter – under a microscope, and proceeded to demonstrate its antimagnetic, levitative properties.
This tiny dot, known as LK-99, could hold immense potential if it is a genuine room-temperature, ambient-condition superconductor as claimed by some scientists – helping to produce technological marvels such as speedy levitating vehicles and 100 per cent efficient electrical grids.
However, there was scepticism and heated debate in the scientific community.
On the same day that the Chinese team’s video went viral, two groups of researchers from China and India published papers on preprint server arXiv, claiming successful preparation of the LK-99 material.
Neither observed the required phenomena of magnetic levitation and zero resistance in their samples.
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A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous.
His response largely represented the attitude of mainstream physicists.
Unlike ordinary conductors, where electrons lose energy as they bump into atoms on the way, making the wire heat up, superconducting materials can convey an electrical current without any resistance at all.
This allows it to make a very strong magnetic field without heating up or consuming enormous energy. That would certainly be a game-changer.
Room temperature superconductivity could revolutionise large-scale equipment such as supersized particle colliders, controlled nuclear fusion systems, quantum computers, and so on.
Medical magnetic resonance scanners could be reduced to the size of a hoop, and the aerospace industry could use the technology in human journeys to Mars.
Under the guidance of a professor, the two HUST students claimed that they had successfully replicated the LK-99 crystal that could be magnetically levitated at room temperature, and demonstrated this in their video.
The feat holds great promise for realising the true potential of room temperature, non-contact superconducting magnetic levitation.
The Chinese feat came days after three physicists in South Korea announced a groundbreaking discovery.
In two papers uploaded to preprint server arXiv on July 22, the team claimed to have created a room-temperature superconductor, a new lead-based compound that they named LK-99.
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The team described their finding as a “brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind”.
Their papers generated a huge buzz, with global interest surging in preparing the material and replicating the Korean experiment, and related videos gained considerable attention on social media.
The process to create LK-99 is not very complex, as the three materials required – copper, phosphorus and lead – are all easily available.
But in China, it was the HUST video that truly caught on. Comments flooded in, with social media users telling of “witnessing a historic moment”, as they hailed the potential launch of a new industrial revolution.
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However, determining whether a material qualifies as a superconductor requires two distinct criteria: exhibiting absolute zero resistance and complete diamagnetism – or the quality of being repelled by a magnet.
While the HUST team seemed to demonstrate the diamagnetic property of LK-99 somewhat, they still need to measure whether the sample would be zero-resistance in nature.
A paper published on arXiv by a researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States supported the possibility of LK-99 in theory through computer modelling.
However, another CAS scientist made the following post on social media: “Let me introduce the ‘USO’ (undefined superconducting objects): numerous claims of discovering ‘new superconducting materials’ with so-called ‘evidence’ have all turned out to be false!”
Whether LK-99 will be an exception remains to be seen.
