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Huge if this is true. Claim is: They have attained superconductivity at room temperature and ambient pressure. Also superconductivity holds till 127 C.
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This is published on ArXiv, meaning it’s not peer-reviewed yet. It is an exciting conclusion, but remember that there is a very real chance that there are errors in the manuscript. The conclusion might end up not being true due to those errors. Try to take this paper with a huge grain of salt.
Peer review is great and all, but they have video. This is either real or outright fraud. I’m don’t know what they’d gain from fraud here, as this is such big news it will be replicated quickly.
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.
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.
Im so ready for this. Going to change the world. Who is smart enough to tell me why this isn’t really a room temperature super conductor?
Something I’d like to point out is that this material is inherently hard to bring to high purity. It relies on a copper atom jumping into a higher energy configuration by chance which is not going to happen often since everything always tends towards the lowest energy configuration possible. Even if you wanted to make a low purity sample and refine it, the supposed material properties depend on the crystal structure, so you can’t melt it down, you can’t crush it and bring the powder back to a solid, it eludes most conventional ways of purifying a material.
If it’s real, we’re not going to see any mass production for a long time. It’ll be harder to mass produce than graphene by quite a bit, and we see how long that’s taking.