Patience and the Difficulty of the LK99 Superconducting Miracles

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People on the internet want instant gratification on the LK99 room temperature superconductor science. We can hope for this and want this but this science is difficult.

I describe in these two videos how difficult but also how important LK99 science is.

The positive partial results only happen in about 10% of the experiments where the exact recipe is successful followed. This is not a simple process and it is new. It is like amateur cooks trying to follow a soufle recipe for the first time. What is success? It is partial levitation and low purity in about 1 in a million pieces of the starting material. You get one milligram or micron flake after starting with 400 grams of starting material. It is a hard and unreliable process.

But that anything is happening at all at room temperature is amazing. They are starting with lead and phosphorous turned into a bone like lead apatite. Copper atoms are added and bonded to the lead. This reduces the volume of the lead apatite by 0.48%. The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress.

This strain replaces diamond presses or extreme cold to generate strong dimagnetism and possibly superconductivity. We compress things and change the volume all the time but precise controlled volume reduction strain has generated dimagnetism and possibly superconductivity. This is a miraculous new way to change fundamental and important magnetic and electrical effects.

Those who think this could all be over, because full and measureable room temperature superconductivity (a holy grail of physics for over 100 years) cannot be replicated based upon analysis of rushed preprint papers? The preprint papers have already opened the door to unknown physics and processes. There are multiple partial replications and simulation models that show how doing this is plausible path to superconductivity or very interesting physics. This highly unreliable process is generating very interesting effects when next to nothing should be happening. The negative results are where the soufle did not rise at all and they analysed mundane raw ingredients.

This is huge new science and could lead to scientific holy grails as much as two layer or five layer magic angle graphene. In 2018, MIT researchers found that if two graphene layers are stacked at a very specific “magic” angle, the twisted bilayer structure could exhibit robust superconductivity, a widely sought material state in which an electrical current can flow through with zero energy loss.

In 2022, the researchers found that four and five graphene layers can be twisted and stacked at new magic angles to elicit robust superconductivity at low temperatures.

The graphene researchers hope that variations on these methods could be a blueprint for designing practical, room-temperature superconductors. IF the properties among family members could be replicated in other, naturally conductive materials then with a lot of time, work and research this could lead to room temperature superconductors.

Nature – Robust superconductivity in magic-angle multilayer graphene family. 2022

Jeong Min Park, Yuan Cao, Li-Qiao Xia, Shuwen Sun, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi & Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.

Compare LK99 to other science and it is very important. If it takes time and hardwork to figure how to make the miraculous into understood science and products, then patience will be required. The job of the big science labs and companies is to speed up the cycle of experimentation, correct analysis of results and updating the theory based on important new experimental results and feeding that in for better predictions on what variations should be tried next for the experiments. Then the quality of theory needs to be assessed and updated with the experiments.

Even if we have found the general location in the chemical and material processes, there could be trillions of variations to be explored and millions of tweeks to the processes, methods and theories. I understanding and productization of electricity and magnets has taken over a hundred years and progress and improvements are still being made. LK99 science and results and fundamentally new and important.

18 thoughts on “Patience and the Difficulty of the LK99 Superconducting Miracles”

  1. I think the problem is in synthesizing the LK-99. Various groups are doing it but with different results. VAPOR DEPOSITION would make synthesis homogenous to the atomic level, a process used in growing synthetic diamonds, a process also borrowed from the semiconductor industry. Better crystallization, doping

  2. So we want a string of atoms, 7 lead, 1 copper, 7 lead, 1 copper, and so on, surrounded by a jacket of apatite.

    What if I take 7 mm plate of lead and put 1 mm copper plate on top.
    Then beat it with a hammer until it’s twice the area, and half the thickness, then cunt in half and stack them. Now I have 3,5 mm lead, 0,5 mm copper, and lead and copper again. Then beat it again, cut and stack, every time the layer get half as thick. When the copper is 0,0000014 mm it is just one atom thick. Just need to repeat 23 times or so.

    Now cut a 1 mm slice and place this slice between two 10 mm layers of apatite. bang it until it’s twice as wide, but do not stretch. Cut inhalf, stack and Repeat 22 times and you should have a sandwich structure. It’s not a pearl string of atoms, but maybe it will work.

    • I hope you are joking. It’s not as simple as stacking atoms, they need a very specific structural arrangement at the atomic scale, something that could never be achieved by hammering material plates together.

  3. Why am I skeptical? Because the original authors worked on this for years and they SHOULD have LOTS of SAMPLES collected along the way, yet I see do not see them sharing these samples and using them to demonstrate room temp SC.

    • They have reported that they will send samples to other researchers in about 2 weeks when the preprints are peer previewed and published. I also don’t think you appreciate the difficulty of synthesis, something that might appear simple can takes years to perfect in materials science.

      • They have **HAD** years to perfect it.
        They should have a LOT of samples.
        They only need a SINGLE sample sent to a reputable lab to confirm that they have a room temp SC.
        The bullsh*t meter is ringing loudly!

  5. The problem is that recipe was not well written, the cooks were not very careful annotating it… and the recipe was divulged early, before they had tested it well enough to know it was good enough, because one cook was fired and put it online.

    The best discussion about LK-99 I have seen so far explains very well all this, with Alex Kaplan
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCw2DroknMs

    • Several of the DFT analysis indicate that material like and inspired by LK99 can work. University of Colorado, Lanzhou and others analysis indicates getting the oxygen and copper right are very promising for superconductors. Other China analysis that switching copper for gold and silver can work better. This to me still looks like a highly promising vein to mine. It was an unknown material zone for possible room temperature superconductivity.

      • The Isotope Effect on SC is well established.

        “Heavy” Oxygen 18 Isotope is about .2% of atmospheric oxygen.

        Ambient oxygen is 99%+ oxygen 16.

        Here is an example of how incorporating specific isotopes can affect SC performance:

        Substituting O-18 into (this) HTSC has been shown to have, “… a strong (~50%) enhancement of Tc”

        https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37582

        Possibly, there being only .2% of available Oxygen 18 to form the crystal lattice of LK99 could explain the tiny amounts of LK99 produced in replication efforts.

    • [ Individual reasons on publishing are counteracting a peer review structure on scientific methodologies, because of maybe political (organizing societies) implications also, with ‘if one intrinsic democratic society would provide this knowledge to all political systems world wide’ or a ‘one-party&limited elections states’ or ‘military governed states’ and
      pure scientifically is why technically room temperature super conduction is theoretically possible, on laboratory scale reproducible (independent from location on globe) and possible getting into industrial scale production including sufficient EROEI (with then getting political impact again). These days researchers and scientists are well aware of their work’s influence (e.g. ‘Oppenheimer’, Sacharow) and medial impact (e.g. ‘The Mauritanian’, Sauerbruch asked by Soviet soldier and medicine professor (told student of him) what’s missing on Charité, Berlin, with destruction of WW2 ‘mind|intellect’, maybe that was only situational context, but followed by action), while not judging, some know ‘both|many’ views of a story|history, with science ideally telling what’s replicable, not what’s truth, motivation or mentalities(?) ]

  6. Getting a single cristal could help to one really big piece of superconducting material as he seems that multiple grains lead to different composition of the material that don’t work

    • Even in a single crystal you could have a mix of some of the copper being in the right place and some of it in the wrong place.

      • Yeah. Still, if someone makes 100 kg scale batches, at some point we should be able to crush and magnetically sort a gram of good material for better characterization. Didn’t Marie Curie spend 3 years attempting to aggregate a fraction of a gram of radium? It’s not working smarter, but do something while the theoreticians figure out how to make this bone out of less toxic elements, and see if there is compound with the internal stress that is less hit or miss with ion placement in the lattice.

        • As I briefly mentioned on an earlier post, replacing the lead with tin just *might* work. Meaning, Sn9Cu(PO4)6O instead of Pb9Cu(PO4)6O.

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