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National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature superconductor
- ggm 3y agoResults of a simulation: the "in mice" of the superconductor debate.
- soligern 3y agoThese are not “results”, this is a theoretical simulation of the model. The Chinese paper failed to reproduce the material.
- King-Aaron 3y agoI may have missed some follow-ups, but wasn't the original team Korean?
- evancox100 3y agoYes, there was a paper published on an unsuccessful reproduction attempt from a Chinese team
- King-Aaron 3y agoAh gotcha
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoMy understanding is that the production process hasn't been fully figured out, even by the original lab. I saw some charts suggesting it took 332 tries to produce 2 similar samples.
- denhaus 3y agoThis is a first-principles calculation known as density functional theory. it’s a useful basis for understanding physics in solids. it won its inventors the nobel prize in chemistry in 1998 iirc
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- denhaus 3y agoThis is a calculation with density functional theory (DFT). Props to the tweet author for mentioning this work, but it doesn’t seem like he knows much about the physics of materials because the explanation re: band theory in the tweet is (imho) not good. For those not familiar with materials physics, the fact that bands cross the fermi level does not make it a superconductor, it makes it a metal; the interesting finding here is that there are isolated (ie, far from other bands’ energies) and flat (ie, non dispersive) d-band states which is related to superconductivity Anyways props to Sinead for doing the work here. Having a theoretical understanding of why LK99 behaves why it does (if it does) will be important for its optimization and commercialization. Briefly reading over the methods it seems(?) like it was quickly done with a GGA functional (given there is a +U correction) rather than a hybrid functional so this was probably not “heavy compute” as the tweet author would have you believe. OP it may be productive to just link directly to Sineads publication rather than this tweet For reference I also work at LBL on computational materials, I have met Sinead on several occasions and she is very legit.
- denhaus 3y agoOops, seems like author actually has studied superconductors in the past so first part of my comment should be retracted. However I stand by the part in that I don’t think his explanation is good
- benabbott 3y agohow do we find out who's working on replication so we can follow their progress?