Scientific detective about LK-99.
(Or how to cook a superconductor in a pot in the kitchen)

Pavel Komarovsky
I write interesting things about finance at t.me/RationalAnswer

When Koreans made a sensational announcement about a new miracle material a few weeks ago, scientists around the world rushed to test it. And do you know who won this race? An anime girl from Twitter, who synthesized this wunderwaffe right in her kitchen in just a day, using the usual Soviet … (sorry, but that’s how it is!)

The heroine of the article smirks as if in response to all the haters from Twitter

If you missed all the hype at the beginning of August about the “new superconductor from Korean scientists”, then sit back, now we will explain everything to you. The intensity of the epic nature of this story in some places just rolls over, but first you have to dive a little into the background of the issue.

This article was co-authored with Mikhail Korobko, a quantum physicist at the University of Hamburg. As usual in such cases, Misha is responsible for the scientific outline of the story, and I am responsible for the creepy memes. Let’s Go!)

Superconductor: Why do you need this superconductivity at all?

Why is superconductivity at room temperature so interesting? And what is such a “super” in superconductors? Let’s sort it out:

When we run electricity through the ordinary wires, we always lose some energy. These losses are due to the presence of the “resistance” in the conductor: it literally resists to our attempts to push the electric current through it.

Amper here seems to want to say: “Help me, stepsister, I’m stuck!”. Oh, sorry, this is from another educational video…

The resistance comes from the physical structure of the conductor. Take, for example, a metal conductor: under the influence of a voltage applied to the metal, free electrons begin to move in it – this is what we call “electric current”. In the process of movement, electrons are “distracted” by the metal atoms themselves and interact with them, which, as it were, “slows down” the movement of electrons. As a result, the energy of the movement of electrons is converted into vibrations of the atoms of the metal conductor – in other words, the conductor heats up.

This process underlies, for example, incandescent light bulbs: the tungsten filament in them has high resistance and heats up very much when current passes through it, emitting bright light.

Strictly speaking, almost anything can become a light bulb if enough power is applied (see the fun raspberry nut)

But it would be nice not to lose extra energy on this resistance of yours where we don’t want it, right? Well, okay, in a light bulb, as we understand, the resistance is just in the subject. But otherwise … Here are just a few examples of scientific and technical goodies that could come into our lives if scientists came up with a new prodigy material with no resistance at all (that is, with superconductivity):

• Transmission of energy over long distances without loss. Built entire fields of solar panels in Africa – and provided electricity to all of Europe, easy-peasy!
• Efficient, cheap and powerful computer chips that use little power and don’t overheat – literally, a “supercomputer in your pocket”.
• And not only ordinary computers – with superconductivity it will probably be possible to finally cut down quantum computers (with the stability of which there are now big problems).
• In materials without resistance, interesting magnetic effects also arise, so you can throw all the levitating vehicles of the future and the ubiquitous super-high-speed magnetic trains here to the heap. Oh, and it will also be possible to make compact MRI machines (which now take up an entire room in hospitals), hang them in the subway, and read the thoughts of all passengers using neural networks!

Future with superconductors vs future without superconductors… Well, you understand: In a world of defeated electrical resistance, there will be happiness for everyone (and no one will leave offended!)

Brief history of practical superconductivity

At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists discovered that the resistance of some materials (such as lead and tin) drops to zero at very low temperatures (around 3 degrees above absolute zero: that is, at -270 degrees Celsius). These materials are called superconductors.

Over time, more and more different materials began to be discovered that showed the properties of superconductivity – but they all worked at hellish cryogenic temperatures (below the temperature of liquid nitrogen, about -196 degrees Celsius). Only at the end of the 80s did they find a class of materials that possess high-temperature superconductivity (well, “high” – a little higher than the temperature of this very liquid nitrogen).

– BatMobil works on superconductors?
– How did you guess?
– Uh.. Deduction and all that…

It would seem: what a problem, let’s just cool the wires with liquid nitrogen – it’s cheap and easy to use! But, unfortunately, almost all high-temperature superconductors are absolutely useless in terms of technology: they are brittle, difficult to process, and it is difficult to make any complex shapes out of them. Therefore, despite the discovery of superconductivity more than a hundred years ago, we practically do not find its application.

Well, okay, such “capricious” superconductors have found some very niche applications: they are used to make superconducting magnets in MRI machines and in all sorts of scientific installations such as the Large Hadron Collider, as well as in quantum computers (where superconducting elements are used as qubits). But in general, the revolution that superconductors promised us has not yet happened. In practice, for it, we need two conditions to be met: superconductivity at ordinary room temperature, and the practicality of creating and using such superconductors.

In recent years, several superconductors have just appeared at temperatures close to room temperature (in the region of -20 degrees Celsius) … But such materials become superconductors only under insanely huge pressure created between special diamond (!) Anvils. In general, again – far from practical application.

Typical news about the invention of the “room” superconductor looks something like this

So, we can say that superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure is the real holy grail for the entire field of superconductivity – for 50 years since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, scientists have been struggling to create such a material.

It is curious that, in principle, there are no physical restrictions on the existence of such superconductors. But we do not yet have a complete theory of superconductivity so that we can “invent” them based on theoretical considerations.

The first theories of superconductivity arose only forty years after the discovery of the effect itself – in the early 50s. The most popular theory among scientists, which is still used today, is called the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory) – it describes superconductivity at the quantum level.

Who do you think Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory was named after? You guessed it: in honor of this same Leon Cooper, one of the co-authors of the BCS theory!

This theory assumes that electrons in superconducting materials are combined into so-called Cooper pairs (we are talking about pairs here, not about vaping), which are all together in a single quantum state. In this state, they do not interact in any way with the atoms of the conductor, and therefore do not experience its resistance.

The BCS theory describes the main processes of superconductivity quite well, but still is not complete: after all, it cannot predict the specific properties of a superconductor and, moreover, does not allow inventing a material with the desired properties based on it. But the most important fail of this theory is that it is unable to predict high-temperature superconductivity – more precisely, it directly prohibits it! Currently, there are several theories that are trying to replace the BCS – but so far none of them can fully explain superconductivity for an arbitrary material: different theories work better for some materials, but worse for others.

In such conditions, scientists have to look for new materials almost blindly, using the so-called “scientific poke”. From time to time, someone throws out a new loud announcement on the Internet about the long-awaited discovery of a room temperature superconductor (here are just a few examples: one, two, three, four, five), but usually no one even pays much attention to them: after all, they almost always turn out to be either are not reproducible by independent scientists, or do not even receive publication in scientific journals at all.

Not so long ago, a big drama broke out with the withdrawal of an article from the prestigious journal Nature about another superconductor at room temperature – it turned out that the data there was simply stupidly fabricated. Well, there is a scientist himself named Ranga Diaz, it must be admitted – a very specific character, and who has already become famous thanks to his “skillful” fakes…

The same Ranga Diaz says in an interview: “I’m sitting on a fishing trip – I’m biting … I’m hooking, and there’s a superconductor, diamagnetism in the entire field, electrons in it just rustle – you can see it with the naked eye !!”

Korean sensation and flying stone

In short, we are already coming close to, in fact, the history of the superconducting superhype of recent weeks: at the end of July, two preprints from Korean scientists appeared on the arXiv website, one of which bore the “modest” name The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor. We must immediately make a reservation that arXiv is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal – there is a certain moderation there, but it works rather “by external signs” and cuts off only very obvious pseudoscience and bullshit.

Even when you read the abstract of the posted preprint, it becomes obvious: with one hand the author was typing letters on the keyboard, and with the other he was frantically imagining how he was already receiving the Nobel Prize for the amazing foundations of being discovery

To say that the whole Twitter bombed from this news is to say nothing. As we wrote above, usually superconductivity does not arouse any special public interest; what exactly attracted tens of thousands of people in social networks this time is hard to say. Perhaps it’s the video demonstration with proof of levitation in the received LK-99 sample (that’s how the Koreans called their discovery) that accompanied these two preprints; or maybe that at first glance there was no obvious crap in these two papers, and serious scientists reacted to them in the style of “hmmm, curious, well, let’s figure it out!”.

A copy of the very original vidos from the Koreans. A little later, they handed over another version of the video to The New York Times – there was already a thermometer in the frame to prove the “room” temperature.

What is interesting about this video, and what does levitation have to do with it? The fact is that in addition to zero resistance, superconductors also have an interesting property: they levitate in a magnetic field – the so-called Meissner effect. (We will not go deep into the details of the physical process here, if you are interested – you can look at this recent article on Habr.)

It was this levitation that was demonstrated in the original video, and it was also posted by various teams of scientists and amateurs in the following days. The message was often this (especially in the interpretation of non-specialists): if it levitates, it means that it is a superconductor! But, strictly speaking, this is not necessarily the case. Magnetic levitation is possible for other materials, and even for living beings: the respected scientist Andre Geim once received not only the Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene, but also the slightly less prestigious Shnobel Prize for experiments on the levitation of a living frog.

The frog of Andre Game starts an experiment on magnetic levitation, I see this (according to the rumours, not a single amphibian was harmed in the process)

This effect of diamagnetism is very similar to the Meissner effect, although it requires much stronger magnetic fields. However, levitation is the simplest first sign of possible superconductivity; and, in fact, the only one available for testing without specialized equipment. Other confirmatory measurements (say, zero resistance of direct interest to us) require great accuracy and special methodology. And levitation, besides, also looks cool!

In general, the whole world held its breath somewhere at this moment: will there be independent confirmation of the Meissner effect – or will everything, like in previous times, stop at the stage of too loud and too hasty statements from the Korean team of scientists? It is here that the heroine of our story enters the stage …

“That Russian Anime Profile Pic Girl” comes into play

While ordinary people on Twitter were talking about how many weeks (or months) it would take for the world’s leading laboratories to replicate LK-99 and confirm its superconductivity, a little-known @iris_IGB account with an anime girl in the avatar decided to take the initiative into their own hands.

To summarize the essence of shieldposting from Iris, it boiled down to something like this: “You are all stupid and not being treated; and if you had at least a little understanding of physics and chemistry at the level of an advanced Soviet schoolchild, you could easily synthesize the right substance yourself!” (I’m exaggerating a little – but, to be honest, not too much).

Iris’ most epic viral thread literally starts with “my girlfriend has a carpet cleaning today and we can’t watch Kin-dza-dza together… so it’s time for room temperature superconductors!” This is followed by an extremely informal description of the theoretical calculations on the theory of superconductivity, and after them – a step-by-step process for obtaining an analogue of LK-99 with pictures in less than a day.

Scraps of Jacobs coffee and creative shit in the kitchen – as some tweeters comment, “this is the atmosphere in which real science from catgirls is going on!” (important disclaimer: the catgirl is Iris’ friend, not herself)

Several things added to the epicness of everything that happened at once:

• Firstly, Alexandra Iris does not specialize in superconductivity physics at all, her area of expertise is soil molecular biology (!).
• Secondly, as she writes herself, Iris did not aim to replicate the entire process from the original paper of the Koreans – she immediately tried to improve their approach, based on her understanding of the likely nature of the observed effects.
• And thirdly: it seems as if she succeeded! In her posted slightly jackal photos, a small grain of some material (“speckle of shit,” as the author writes) is visible, which “levitates” above a magnet inside a hollow tube.

July 30th tweet, 3.7M views: First independent photographic evidence of LK-99-like properties on the entire web! (Unless you’re into anime, “fanservice” is usually used to refer to erotic content for die-hard fans of a series.)

Then everything developed exactly as is customary on the Internet: they began to show Alexandra for the dumb quality of the photo and for not wanting to record a video – she snapped in response in the style of “and you open any Soviet textbook, synthesize the same thing using it – and shoot your own fanservice in whatever format you want!!”

Regular references to the USSR in Iris’ tweets are not accidental here: she herself firmly stands on the position that the Soviet scientific school simply hides, without getting up from the couch, everything else that is happening in scientific laboratories around the world. And all this mess with the LK-99, they say, is an ideal illustration of this!

After all, Lee and Kim (the authors of LK-99 – in fact, it was their names that formed the title of the material) in the 1990s worked with the Korean professor Tong-Seek Chair (Choi?), who had previously worked together with Professor Galashevich in Poland – and he, in turn, was a student of the Soviet scientist Nikolai Bogolyubov, who in the 1950s created his own theory of superconductivity. In the scientific mainstream, this theory did not take root very much, losing the battle for the minds of this most popular Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory, but … Perhaps there was something in it after all? At least, it seems that this is what Alexandra Iris herself thinks.

Prof. Bogolyubov, judging by the archival photos, was a rather stylish guy. I would venture to suggest that if he had been born in the early 2000s, he would now be a regular at anime festivals …

Epilogue: it seems that the miracle did not happen

Immediately after @iris_IGB, other independent checks began to slowly come in. Somewhere the samples levitated, somewhere they did not; but each new video and photo was met with another wave of delight. Serious scientists reacted to them, trying to explain that these observations do not yet prove anything – such reactions also went viral, and the public was again disappointed.

The swing between delight and disappointment has led to the fact that the story began to be followed far from the scientific community – like a cool series, stocking up on popcorn. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that the original preprints themselves came out with drama: the co-authors accused each other of violating scientific ethics – they said that the articles were posted without the permission of the co-authors, quietly. At the same time, the preprints themselves contained visible errors in the graphs and a lot of inaccuracies, which somewhat complicated the replication process (go figure it out – did you get exactly what you need, or some other material?).

Soon, the pebbles were already “flying” in several laboratories, and everyone completely did not care about all the problems of preprints. A week later, theoretical articles were published with numerical calculations of the structure of the material, which turned out to be close to that expected from a superconductor. Although many other materials could have such a structure, the new burst of hype was unstoppable: not only did the stones fly, but the “theory proved everything” already!!

But then everything went a little downhill: last week more serious studies of a new material began to appear, and so far none of them shows the desired properties of a superconductor.

Yes, it flies in a magnetic field – but just like an ordinary ferromagnet. If in earlier articles it was possible to say that the material was “wrong”, “it was not synthesized in the right way”, then here the structure has already been confirmed with accuracy.

In one very recent study, scientists made pure LK-99 without any impurities – and it turned out to be not only not a superconductor, but also an excellent insulator! And all the properties that made it look like a superconductor were actually due to impurities of copper sulfide that got into the manufacturing process (why these impurities have such an effect is explained in a separate article).

In general, so far, of the many attempts to reproduce observations, not one has shown superconductivity. There is a feeling that this opening can be closed – at the moment there is a consensus that there is no smell of superconductivity in LK-99. Of course, we can wait for more independent reviews, publication of results in peer-reviewed articles and other things – but there are still not so many reasons for optimism…

On Twitter, LK-99 has been buried with honors for a whole week.

However, Alexandra Iris herself does not seem to lose her optimism: she continues to tweet reasoning about her thoughts about LK-99, and also trolls her critics with the help of rebukes stylized as visual anime novels. If I understand correctly, she believes that LK-99 itself is not a superconductor; however, she says that she observed the Meissner effect in the grain synthesized by her with her own eyes and … I don’t know, here I’m already confused what specific conclusions should be drawn from this – but personally I don’t exclude that in six months we will see a new interesting a scientific article from some Moscow research institute.

In the end, on the selfie published by Alexandra, something like this happens – enthusiastic people are sawing some kind of prodigy in the laboratory …

Sometimes you still really want to believe that people with anime avatars, who have obscura knowledge of the ancient Soviet sages, are able to save the world – right?

PS: If this article gets a lot of likes, Mikhail Korobko and I will try to make a follow-up to it with comments from Alexandra Iris herself, as well as with the opinion of some specialist physicist directly in the field of superconductivity. If you don’t want to miss the following materials on the topic, then we invite you to subscribe to the TG channels of the authors: Mikhail Korobko’s Homeostatic Universe (for those who want to fumble for physics and science) and Pavel Komarovsky’s RationalAnswer (for those who are for a rational approach to life, but prefers a little easier).