Explainer | What are superconductors and why are scientists sceptical about the LK-99 ‘breakthrough’?
- Many claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors have fallen flat but the hope of finding revolutionary material pushes research forward
- China places a high priority on the field and has funded major research projects with a strong, nationwide talent team
From national laboratories in the United States and India to universities in China, teams have scrambled to replicate the experiment. Most have failed, but a couple of exceptions claim partial success.
Critics said the manuscripts, uploaded to the preprint platform arXiv and waiting to be peer reviewed for publication, contained low-quality data and were not worth investigating.
“I work in the field and we discussed the preprint a bit in the research group this morning. In short, we don’t believe a word of it,” a German experimental physicist wrote on his blog last week.
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China completes superconducting test run for 1,000km/h ultra high-speed maglev train
And a theorist at the Argonne National Laboratory in the US told Science magazine: “They come off as real amateurs. They don’t know much about superconductivity.”