Claimed Room Temperature Superconductor awaits independent confirmation

The Indian chemists who posted an Arxiv paper that nanostructured silver and gold are room temperature superconductors are well-regarded chemical physicists from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.

The researchers are not sharing their samples or their data. They are having their results validated by independent experts in the respective research fields.

The independent confirmation should not take more than a few weeks. The actual testing work should only take a day or two if the materials are clearly working as claimed. It would take time to make the writeup and testing bulletproof for the massive scrutiny that it will get.

There is also the time needed for any patent filings and setting up companies.

The negative attention and scrutiny that is also being given to the paper will likely slow down the publishing of confirmation.

Possbile Data problems have been noted in the paper

Pratap Raychaudhuri suggested how the noise could be the same.

Raychaudhuri noted other anomalies. The gold and silver nanostructure exhibited a resistive (in other words, electrical) and magnetic transition to a superconductor at the same temperature. According to Raychaudhuri, this would only happen if the test was done on the same sample, which the authors reported was not the case. Raychaudhuri argued that these issues could be easily resolved if the authors would share their test samples with the wider research community, which he said so far they haven’t done.

12 thoughts on “Claimed Room Temperature Superconductor awaits independent confirmation”

  1. Wow, that Twitter thread (41 posts by Mr. Skinner) is something out of a spy movie. Going to check back in with this over the next few weeks for sure!

  2. Wow that Twitter thread (41 posts by Mr. Skinner) is something out of a spy movie. Going to check back in with this over the next few weeks for sure!

  3. I have read the article, and there are so many strange things. Why did they not measure the critical current? It would have been extremely easy: just connect any constant current source with a shunt, and measure away. The critical current should be reduced as the magnetic field increases, and they had a magnet in their set-up already (they measured how the critical temperature was affected by the magnetic field). Also, what is with the measurement precision? They claim only to be able to measure down to 10^-4 Ohm. A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that they should have been able to push up to 250 mA through the film and avoid turning a run-of-the-mill superconductor (10^6 A/cm2) to a normal state. So, their precision would equal being able to measure no better than 25 uV…? What kind of poor equipment do they have, anyway? Since they deposited the film, why not deposit is in a meandering pattern, as to increase length of the film? Now, they had 0.1 mm between the digits of the electrodes. Just increasing the length to 10 mm would increase their precision to 10^-6 Ohms, or 10^-12 Ohm*meter for the films resistivity. Even before starting the measurements, they must have known these limitations, and could have avoided them easily. I think the article is kind of fishy… Avoided obvious measurements… Poor methods… Strange precision….

  4. I have read the article and there are so many strange things. Why did they not measure the critical current? It would have been extremely easy: just connect any constant current source with a shunt and measure away. The critical current should be reduced as the magnetic field increases and they had a magnet in their set-up already (they measured how the critical temperature was affected by the magnetic field).Also what is with the measurement precision? They claim only to be able to measure down to 10^-4 Ohm. A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that they should have been able to push up to 250 mA through the film and avoid turning a run-of-the-mill superconductor (10^6 A/cm2) to a normal state. So their precision would equal being able to measure no better than 25 uV…? What kind of poor equipment do they have anyway?Since they deposited the film why not deposit is in a meandering pattern as to increase length of the film? Now they had 0.1 mm between the digits of the electrodes. Just increasing the length to 10 mm would increase their precision to 10^-6 Ohms or 10^-12 Ohm*meter for the films resistivity. Even before starting the measurements they must have known these limitations and could have avoided them easily.I think the article is kind of fishy… Avoided obvious measurements… Poor methods… Strange precision….

  5. I have read the article, and there are so many strange things. Why did they not measure the critical current? It would have been extremely easy: just connect any constant current source with a shunt, and measure away. The critical current should be reduced as the magnetic field increases, and they had a magnet in their set-up already (they measured how the critical temperature was affected by the magnetic field).

    Also, what is with the measurement precision? They claim only to be able to measure down to 10^-4 Ohm. A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that they should have been able to push up to 250 mA through the film and avoid turning a run-of-the-mill superconductor (10^6 A/cm2) to a normal state. So, their precision would equal being able to measure no better than 25 uV…? What kind of poor equipment do they have, anyway?

    Since they deposited the film, why not deposit is in a meandering pattern, as to increase length of the film? Now, they had 0.1 mm between the digits of the electrodes. Just increasing the length to 10 mm would increase their precision to 10^-6 Ohms, or 10^-12 Ohm*meter for the films resistivity. Even before starting the measurements, they must have known these limitations, and could have avoided them easily.

    I think the article is kind of fishy… Avoided obvious measurements… Poor methods… Strange precision….

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