Yes but LK-99 is practically unusable in current form if it's a superconductor. There needs to be a lot more material science research before it can be put into utopian use cases that everyone is dreaming about. Recent AI boom brought a lot more finished products which can be immediately put to use.
When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third world country like ours will never use it.
The materials and hardware required to make LK-99 are within the reach of a high school. It's really simple and doesn't require anything more than a very hot oven (hotter than a domestic one, but still very common). If it'd turned out to be a real superconductor anyone who wanted to make it could have done.
But let's stop deceiving everyone into thinking everything using superconducting wires/cables will magically become room-temperature if LK-99 is real. They won't, you don't make such things from brittle ceramic.
Thunderf00t's point, though, is that LK-99 is not novel in its material category. High temperature superconductors that are hard and brittle already existed. What would be interesting would be a malleable high temperature semiconductor, because then you can make it into cables.
The enthusasiam is nice but there's a lot of NIH going on. I'd encourage people to research subject matter before thinking no one else has had similar ideas before.
It's "easy to make" in a sense, but the yields are insanely low (think 1/1000) or less of input materials. This indicates there are some variables that either are not controlled for or cannot be controlled.
That being said, its still early but it looks like LK-99 is not what we typically think about when we think of a super conductor. If we can figure out a good way to make it (with time we likely will), it will still have applications, just likely not high power transmission ones.
My money is still on LK-99 being a finicky topological (only conducts in one direction) superconductor.
Its what the simulations suggest. It would explain why the replication attempts failed.
Its perhaps no world-saving bulk superconductor, but that still seems like a fascinating material for, say, microelectronics or high power electronics. For instance, what if foundries could align it and work it into a metal layer for microchips? Maybe they could take advantage of the directionality to make a gate out of it.
> it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.
Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And all of these would not be things that can just be worked around with better production processes or smart engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of the specific material, just like the low temperature requirements of currently known superconductors will never be improved with more research.
So this isn't a matter of when they would reach the point of being better economically, it's also very much a matter of if they would ever reach that point. Hopefully, we'll get lucky one day and find a material that is superconducting at room temperature and above, that is study and light and easy to make into wires and made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99 certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely wouldn't have been much better than other known materials for most applications.
Someone on YouTube mentioned that LK99 is ceramic ie not metal which nullifies many of its potential uses even if it does turn out to be superconducting
Perhaps a charitable interpretation of that statement is "there are years of work to go from a proof of concept to a usable product". Even if LK-99 is some kind of a superconductor, there are a whole host of daunting technical issues that will need to be solved. For example: how do we get the yield up? How to turn it into a wire? If the material is not ductile, how to form the wire into a useful shape? How to reliably couple to the wire? How does the material age over time and and humidity? How to deposit and pattern it as a thin film?
We have a lot of arrows in our quiver to shoot at these problems -- I would be optimistic that the promising applications of a room temperature superconductor would attract plenty of investment and talent. On the other hand, I imagine it may take years or even decades before we have answers to these hard questions. As the quote says, "there's no guarantee" that we can solve them, because right now we know so little about the properties of the material at this time. Of course, that is no reason to throw in the towel right now!
I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't. They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don't have. That alone doomed LK-99 to the department of "cool, but not super useful", since most of the really interesting uses were for large things, not small ones.
LK99 isn't necessarily a stand-in for helium cooled superconductors - if all SC were equivalent to any other, YBCO and similar would have been enough to make MRIs significantly cheaper - LN2 is easy and cheap to produce.
My takeaway is that nobody, not even the original authors, knows a good, easily replicable way to make LK-99.
A clear no would be multiple sources synthesizing a material that is clearly the same as LK-99 (e.g. by showing most or all of the behavior shown in the videos or described in one of the papers), and then showing experimentally that it isn't actually a superconductor but that some other effect is at play.
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