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So is LK-99 still something that may be useful in some other way due to some confirmed property? Or was all this just a mistake, from a usefulness perspective.
by MBCook 3y ago
So is LK-99 still something that may be useful in some other way due to some confirmed property?
Or was all this just a mistake, from a usefulness perspective.
It was fun to watch, nice to get hope of something so cool, and good to see the scientific process in action.
But is there any reason to keep researching LK-99 over some other random compound?
- scythe 3y agoOne of the papers that argued that LK-99's levitation was due to mixed diamagnetism and weak ferromagnetism also assigned it a very strong diamagnetism: -2•10^-4, which would make it the second-strongest such material known, beating out bismuth. Probably not that useful, but interesting if confirmed. I read some of the papers linked in this article, but they use different units and don't identify a diamagnetic susceptibility in the way that I'm used to, so I'm not sure if that was confirmed (and I have stuff to do).
- platz 3y agoBut, a lot of those studies weren't using pure LK-99 but samples with lots of copper sulfide mixed in.
- scythe 3y agoCopper sulfide's diamagnetism is not that high. It would be notable if it were. So that isn't a possible explanation. Cu2S was suggested as a culprit for the observed conductivity changes. The preprint reporting the high value of diamagnetism is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf >The subtracted diamagnetic susceptibility is larger than that of Bismuth and water but smaller than that of Pyrolytic carbon (page 3, bottom left)