2023-08-04 16:35:00
The flame undulates, suffocates, dies, then springs up again. The tip of one of his heat-burnished gloves, Andrew McCalip, a strapping 34-year-old, adjusts his slightly fogged gas mask. Then he approaches his blowtorch with a visibly patched up aluminum handle. The American, a satellite manufacturer on his own, has spent the last few nights trying to vacuum seal a quartz tube, in front of around 15,000 people on the Twitch platform.
From one of his warehouses in California, the engineer took it into his head to manufacture LK-99, an alloy made from red phosphorus, copper, sulphate and lead oxide, whose the recipe was recently posted on the scientific pre-publication platform arXiv by a team of previously unknown Korean researchers. “That should do the trick,” he enthuses, flag of the United States fixed to the wall. A badly placed blow of heat would be enough to ignite the barrels of nitrogen and oxygen stored a little further, behind.
Once its structure has been modified, transmuted, the mixture could acquire the power to change the world. It would be, according to its designers, the “first superconductor at ambient temperature and pressure”. Until now, these materials which offer no resistance to electric current, which we have known since 1911, were only rarely used because they can only be used at -270 degrees or subjected to extreme pressure. “In these elements, the electrons pair up and coordinate, an optimized state but a priori untenable under normal conditions”, explains Douglas Natelson, physicist at Rice University, Texas.
This was a great test run of the quartz vacuum sealing rig. We were at 3e-3torr when we sealed off. It went smoothly enough for a first effort. I gave it 5min at vacuum to flash off any moisture in the powder. pic.twitter.com/b9cQ1x3eUB
— Andrew McCalip (@andrewmccalip) July 28, 2023
How to change the world
If the discovery were confirmed, it would generate a technological revolution comparable to the invention of the transistor, a component that allowed the development of computing. A room-temperature superconductor would pave the way for infinite batteries, portable MRIs or desktop quantum computers and potentially accelerate the race to nuclear fusion. It could save the 3% of electricity injected into the global grid just to cover losses related to the resistance of current cables. The fact remains that, for the moment, the study put online by Korean scientists has not been corrected or published in an academic journal, an essential course for scientific copying.
What most fascinates Andrew McCalip and the thousands of Geo Trouvetou who have read, re-read, commented, and for some tried to reproduce the study themselves, in the middle of the messages posted by specialists, it is perhaps the ability of superconductors to levitate. Endowed with a very strong repulsive magnetic power, they take off when approaching certain metals, enough to revolutionize transport. To convince, the team at the origin of the LK-99 attached to its study a video where we see a small piece of LK-99 floating in the air above a small magnet. A few days later, students from China’s Huazhong University also released a similar recording, announcing that they had successfully synthesized the alloy. Without yet giving a written account of their work.
If the validity of their work is confirmed, the LK-99 could make Lee Seok-bae, Kim Ji-hoon and Kwon Young-wan, the three main authors of the study, the next Nobel Prize in physics. But by hastening to reveal their results, the fathers of LK-99 above all risk joining the many modern-day alchemists who, convinced of obtaining the grail, have fallen into oblivion, for lack of evidence to match their theories. Too bad if all this turns out to be a mistake, something relatively common in the field, because electrical voltage measurements are sometimes capricious: through his improvised broadcast, Andrew McCalip wanted to be part of it, and he too wanted to “advance humanity “, playing the apprentice chemists, he explains on Twitter.
Do it yourself
Many before them made similar claims, convinced that the metal they held in their hands had exploitable properties. “Announcements of superconductors at room temperature, there are regularly. None have been confirmed. But, until now, replicating the experiment was not affordable, because the materials needed to be subjected to strong pressure, using expensive devices. Here, only relatively common basic equipment is needed”, sighs Julien Bobroff, CNRS physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay, surprised to see his field of study, usually little followed, becoming one of the topics of the moment.
A few years ago, another scientist, Ranga Dias, announced that it had made a superconductor at room temperature, before finding itself discredited, very recently. Reviewers commissioned by the academic journal Physical Review Letters discovered a posteriori the clues “of a fabrication or falsification of data” in one of his articles published in 2021. His philosopher’s stone? A mixture of lutetium, hydrogen and nitrogen which, according to him, allowed superconductivity at room temperature. With as evidence graphs copied from other experiments, bearing on other materials. His article will be retracted.
None of Ranga Dias’ results have been replicated, and another of his posts had already been taken down by Nature, a leading scientific journal. Several American media also reported last April the presence of identical passages from other authors in the researcher’s thesis, completed in 2013 at Washington State University. A fifth of the document thanks to which he obtained his doctorate in physics would be plagiarism, according to the journal Science. What seriously undermine its credibility, and by extension to the latest announcements on the subject.
“Inconsistencies in the results”
As soon as the LK-99 started to become popular, Julien Bobroff also staged himself in front of the camera. This time, no counter experience, but a speech aimed at recalling the scientific method. “There is a desire on social networks, more or less displayed, of certain actors who are not scientists to do without institutions and protocols”, regrets the physicist. In his video, he recalls that in the absence of proofreading by scientists who did not participate in the work, of publication in a journal, and above all of replication, a few lines on a scientific forum are not proof.
Javier Villegas, he decided to send an email to the Korean team. The physicist from the joint CNRS-Thalès unit in Paris-Saclay wants a sample to get an idea for himself. A few critical studies, also before proofreading, have already been posted online, but they do not allow any conclusions to be drawn, because they have not been proofread either. As it stands, the scientist remains skeptical. “There are inconsistencies in the results. The data used is not conventional, and is not really characteristic of a superconductor, and, in addition, there are several really murky elements”, he showers, provided from a list of problems that jumped out at him.
Researchers who, like Javier Villegas, work directly on the subject seriously question the capabilities attributed to LK-99. “Items are loosely reported and presented. There are shortcuts between results and interpretations that give the impression that researchers do not understand what they are talking about. It is poorly written, and the bibliography contains esoteric references, articles with strange titles, which go against very established facts”, he insists, without deciding firmly, scientific reserve obliges. To decide, it will be necessary to wait a few months, the time that consensus studies emerge.
From his warehouse in California, Andrew McCalip assures his followers that he should be able to get LK-99 by the end of the week. He will then be able to carry out summary tests, before sending his creation to real scientists. This Friday, all he has to do is mix and bake the lanarkite and the copper phosphide. The engineer took a little delay, because, in the United States, one of the basic ingredients of all this small kitchen, the red phosphorus, is very controlled, delivered with the dropper. It is also used to make methamphetamine, the star drug of the Breaking Bad series. A completely different rock.
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