2023-08-09 14:11:49
Huazhong University of Science and Technology Why the revolutionary LK-99 ‘superconductor’ is starting to chill physicists
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Wuhan University video replicating LK-99.
ENERGY – The case isn’t folded yet, but it’s starting to smell scorched. At the end of July, a South Korean team revealed that it had touched on the impossible: creating a superconducting material, baptized ” LK-99 “, which therefore opposes no resistance to the passage of electricity, while having these properties so precious at ordinary temperatures.
In other words: there is no longer any need, as is the case for the rare superconductors used today, to immerse them in an atmosphere at -275 Celsius. For energy conservation and transport, the absence of cooling is a leap into the future. Remember that RTE, the French utility in charge of electricity transmission, estimates its losses in copper cables (a material merely » conductor) of up to 15% of the electricity transported. Replaced by a superconducting material, the figure would simply drop to 0%.
Not to mention other fascinating concrete applications: the processors of our computers, whose rise in temperature parallel to the power slows down the capacities, would no longer have this problem. Finally, superconductors have the property of levitating when they are placed above a magnet. The result of two opposing forces, which can excite the imagination of many dreamers, including physicists. This was perhaps their first mistake.
Wuhan’s Wet Firecracker
“There is a fascination, especially with this video which showed an object in levitation”explained to HuffPost Julien Bobroff, physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay. “ But lots of objects can levitate without being superconductors. » However, if the South Korean team had also made public two preprintsthat is to say studies not yet reviewed by a peer-reviewed journal, it is true that their video is for many in the excitement, not only of physicists, but also of enthusiastic amateurs, to reproduce the ‘experience.
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There was certainly a confirmation as of August 5, but in the form of a wet firecracker, of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology from Wuhan, China. With a video in support, again, but a total lack of transparency, followed by a suspicious coaster which almost entirely tarnished this success. THE preprint will still have to be verified to shed light on this experience.
And since… boom, but gently. All the physicists in the race have not yet delivered their conclusions, far from it, but some authoritative ones have already delivered their verdict. There National Taiwan University thus explained on August 6 that it had failed in its attempts at replication. Two days later, a team from the physics department of the University of Maryland, in the United States, published a series of tweets explaining without ambiguity why the South Korean conclusions were an error of analysis.
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« It is NOT a superconductor. It is a high strength and poor quality material “, decided the American team, leaving no room for doubt. Is all hope lost? Not sure. First, not all teams work with the exact recipe of the South Korean pioneers. Some have chosen to vary the method a little.
The time of social networks against that of scientists
Then, mathematical simulations (and not tangible replications) confirmed, twice, that the material could indeed exist with these properties without violating any physical principles. Please note, this is again preprintstherefore unverified studies by physicists not belonging to the team.
Far from the universities, on the side of amateurs launched into the race, the case ofAndrew McCalip, one of the first to have publicly launched the race for the famous material, is quite emblematic. After several tests, the American had the product of his attempt analyzed by a laboratory: it certainly has ferromagnetic properties which explain its ability to levitate above a magnet, but it is not a superconductor.
If there is therefore no conclusion to the story of LK-99 yet, the thermometer has largely cooled in a few days, as the first feedback almost all leans on the wrong side of the scales. For a definitive answer, it will probably be necessary to wait for the stage which, for the moment, is sorely lacking: an experiment whose results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal, therefore a panel of independent physicists.
But faced with such potential, the time is not for patience. And virality version 2023 does not help. As Julien Bobroff summarizes, “the time of scientific confirmation, social networks do not necessarily give it”.
See also on Le HuffPost :
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