Huge if this is true. Claim is: They have attained superconductivity at room temperature and ambient pressure. Also superconductivity holds till 127 C.

  • Arfrar@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Just by looking at the authors, this is not real:

    Of the three, the first author (and corresponding author) and second author claim Q-centre as affiliation. If you check the webpage, it is not a research lab but just a commercial company selling this as a product. The third author claims KU-KIST as affiliation, but the only one I can find in google scholar has no background on superconductivity at all, and actually I can’t even find them as a current faculty member of KU-KIST.

    If you look at the other paper they have in arxiv about the same, list of authors from the same Q-Centre, plus a last author from Hanyang university, but researchgate shows him as last publishing in 2006, so I assume long time retired by now. Not in the field of superconductors either.

    I am looking for other work from any of the authors, and I can find none. Science is an incremental process, with some breakthroughs, sure, but incremental. Cancer won’t be cured in a day, and room temperature ambient pressure superconductors won’t just happen out of nowhere. Even room temperature superconductors at very high pressures aren’t really a thing, as the recent retractions of Ranga Dias’ papers shows.

    As an aside, here is an interesting talk about the work that went into showing that the data was manipulated in those high-pressure room-temperature superconductor papers - as much as papers with manipulated data are a terrible thing for science, the fact that people will go to these lengths to prove them wrong is very reassuring. A paper that is wrong only misleads for a while, actual science pushes through and buries it eventually.

    • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      There is no room for a mistake or massaging data here. The authors have photos and video of magnetic levitation. It is either outright fraud, or true. You are claiming without evidence that these people intentionally faked the paper and it is entirely made up (which could well be true, but is a much stronger claim than shoddy statistical analysis, and much easier to prove).

      As to prior work. All three authors have previous publications on perovskites. If the trick for room temperature superconductivity turns out to be putting a low temperature superconducting material in a crystal lattice where it doesn’t have enough room (which is a concept consistent with existing literature), then it seems reasonable that a perovskite researcher would discover it first as there is not really any special knowledge of superconductivity beyond the basics required (ie. The what is exceedingly simple if it turns out it works, the how is hard and is not the domain of a superconductivity expert).

      Extraordinary claims and all that, but none of your criticisms are valid.