New discoveries: LK-99 is the superconductor of the summer
The unusual material, named LK-99, has been presented to the world as a superconductor that would carry electricity at room temperatures with zero resistance.
File photo
NEW YORK: When Sinead Griffin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California had some new findings to share about a seemingly magical material that has made users of Twitter go gaga, she did not have to do much to gain a lot of attention.
The unusual material, named LK-99, has been presented to the world as a superconductor that would carry electricity at room temperatures with zero resistance.
On Twitter — or X, as Elon Musk has renamed it — “LK-99” has been a trending topic in recent days, and enthusiasts have hailed what they believe to be a long-sought holy grail of physics, one that would transform everyday life with new technologies to solve climate change and make levitating trains commonplace.
On Monday evening, Dr. Griffin let the social media world know of her findings in a short post that contained only a link to her preliminary paper and an animated GIF of President Barack Obama dropping a microphone at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2016. The response was rhapsodic. The mic drop was interpreted by some X users as confirmation that the holy grail had been found.
Dr. Griffin thus provided another twist in a roller coaster of excitement and deflation that has enthralled LK-99 fans for more than a week. The saga started when a team of South Korean scientists, most working for a tiny start-up company named Quantum Energy Research Center in Seoul, posted two reports that described their technique for making LK-99 and the measurements that they said showed the material’s superconducting prowess. (The name of the material comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the year 1999, when they say they first synthesized LK-99.)
Most strikingly, they provided a video showing a small sample partially levitating over a magnet. The levitation, the scientists said, demonstrated the Meissner effect, which ensures zero magnetic field inside a superconductor.
Alex Kaplan, who had majored in physics at Princeton University, found out about LK-99 on Hacker News, a news aggregation website. “I was just shocked,” Mr. Kaplan said in an interview. “My jaw dropped to the floor, and I started calling every friend that I knew in physics.”
That night, he shared his excitement on Twitter. With that tweet, which has received more than 132,000 likes, Mr. Kaplan joined a group of LK-99 fans who propelled excitement on social media over the past week. Most of the enthusiasts are not experts, however. Mr. Kaplan, for example, works as the head of coffee product at Cometeer, a company that sells flash-frozen coffee extract. The scientists who study superconductivity and solid state physics have been quieter. They appreciate the curiosity — their work rarely draws a frenzy of public glee — but they are puzzled as to why this particular room-temperature superconductor claim took off wildly while many earlier claims that did not prove out came and went without fanfare.
