South Korean Researchers’ Superconductor Breakthrough Draws Doubts Among Experts

Superconducting materials have strange and unusual properties including magnetic levitation. ktsimage/iStock/Thinkstock

South Korean researchers have recently published a paper about a room-temperature superconductor they created, a potentially groundbreaking creation that is met with skepticism by experts.

In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server on July 22, researchers from the Quantum Energy Research Centre said they had successfully synthesized a room-temperature superconductor with a modified lead-apatite structure.

The material, dubbed LK-99, operates at ambient pressure and temperatures as high as 400 Kelvin or 127 Celsius, according to the paper. Their findings quickly garnered the interest of experts around the world.

A second paper was posted on arXiv on the same day, explaining how the “modified-lead apatite crystal structure” was created using the solid-state method. Both papers have not yet been peer-reviewed.

U.S.-based academic journal Science said the discovery would be “one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics” if true but added that the papers “are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical.”

Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory, expressed reservations about the papers, saying the researchers come off as “real amateurs.” He mentioned that researchers at Argonne tried to test the experiment.

“They don’t know much about superconductivity, and the way they’ve presented some of the data is fishy,” Mr. Norman was quoted as saying in the Science.

Nadya Mason, a physicist at the University of Illinois, told Science that “the data seems a bit sloppy.” But she noted that the researchers took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques.

The Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics, a group of experts, said that it had asked Quantum Energy Research Centre to submit samples in order to verify its researchers’ findings of a room-temperature superconductor material.

The group stated that “there has been a lot of controversy over the authenticity of the reported results at home and abroad, and other claims are being added without being peer-reviewed.”

“Based on data from the two archived papers and the video made public, the materials ... cannot be called room temperature superconductors at this point,” the group said in a statement on Thursday.

The group said organizations such as Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Pohang University of Science and Technology would verify the findings if any sample is provided by Quantum Energy Research Centre, while member organizations are carrying out their own verification research.

Superconductors, substances with no electrical resistance, are considered valuable as they can allow electrical currents to pass through without losing energy.

But the handful of materials discovered so far only exhibit superconductivity at extremely cold temperatures or high pressures, making them impractical for widespread use.

Reuters contributed to this report.