LK-99: A Room-Temp/Ambient-Pressure Superconductor?

[gsoda3 3262]

those two korean guys just had their life's work invalidated.  ouch.  20+ years' worth of doing it on a part time basis before quitting their full time jobs and chasing this dream.

[Homercles 10205]

If 20 years, your ‘life’s work’, can be invalidated in a few week’s time by the internet…then maybe you should have quietly reached out to actual professionals for a valid test plan 

[gsoda3 3262]

34 minutes ago, Homercles said:

If 20 years, your ‘life’s work’, can be invalidated in a few week’s time by the internet…then maybe you should have quietly reached out to actual professionals for a valid test plan 

 

they are professionals.  the LK in LK-99 stands for their names-  Lee and Kwon, and the initial year of discovery, 1999.  Lee's doctorate dissertation was about a theoretical superconductive compound that no one believed could exist.  Kim was a fellow researcher recruited by Lee's mentor to help find a specific superconductive material he (the boss, Choi) was trying to create.  Kim was the mechanical genius in the lab while Lee was his theoretical counterpart. they first saw this compound in the late 90s for a brief moment.  they saw what they believed to be superconductive properties.  they spend the next two decades plus trying to recreate the compound.  during that time their chief tasks lay elsewhere but they spent time outside of work on this project.  eventually in 2017 when their mentor died they gave up all other projects and assembled a lab to pursue this project full time.  

 

they enlisted the help of another professor at korea university, kwon, who already had a lot of the necessary equipment.  he also helped them raise funding.  long story short, in 2018 they found whatever they thought they saw in the late 90s.  they needed time to analyze what they saw.  then they needed to go through the process of peer review and publication.  but covid happened and the process of analysis and review was absurdly slow.  fast forward a couple years and lee, kim, and kwon were working in isolation due to covid protocol.  kim was working with a stateside scientist (another korean i forget the name) to independently the superconductive natures of the compound and they were achieving desired results about 1 out of 10 times.  that spooked kwon, who knew that only 3 people could get the nobel prize for any single entry.  he was scared of being marginalized so he rushed his non-peer reviewed publication to arXiv, which over the course of covid was established as a github of sorts for the scientific community since journalistic publication, peer review, etc came grinding to a halt.  

 

 

[ztejas 43449]

1 hour ago, gsoda3 said:

that spooked kwon, who knew that only 3 people could get the nobel prize for any single entry.  he was scared of being marginalized so he rushed his non-peer reviewed publication to arXiv, which over the course of covid was established as a github of sorts for the scientific community since journalistic publication, peer review, etc came grinding to a halt.  

Yeah that sounds very professional...

These guys are clowns.

[ConferenceRoom 6141]

1 hour ago, ztejas said:

Yeah that sounds very professional...

These guys are clowns.

[gsoda3 3262]

1 hour ago, ztejas said:

Yeah that sounds very professional...

covid ushered in a change of times.  there was a real need to shortcut processes, either as a result of a change in behavior (covid protocols forced a change in habits) or as a legitimate and urgent need to achieve results (covid vax for example).  some results were beneficial, some weren't.  as the situation around the world normalizes i'm sure we'll find a new balance of efficiency and thoroughness.

[bschoolprof 6254]

oops.  Recent paper on this in Nature was retracted.  

Quote

Room-Temperature Superconductor Paper Retracted by Journal Nature

Blockbuster finding would have paved the way for more efficient energy grids, batteries, computers

A physicist whose burgeoning career has been rocked by accusations of plagiarism and professional misconduct has now had his biggest discovery invalidated by the journal that published the research.

In March, Ranga Dias and his team made the electrifying claim that they had identified a room-temperature superconductor—a discovery that, if true, would have been a step toward revolutionizing energy grids, battery technology, computer processors and a host of other electrical systems by making them work more efficiently.

Instead, after months of public criticism from other physicists, a written request from eight of the study’s 11 authors and an internal investigation of its own, the journal Nature on Tuesday retracted the paper.

“These concerns are credible, substantial and remain unresolved,” a notice now posted alongside the paper states. Dias and two other authors didn’t say whether they agree with the retraction.

Dias, who led the research at the University of Rochester, told The Wall Street Journal in September that he “never engaged in the fabrication, manipulation, or misrepresentation of data in any of my research endeavors.”

In the now-retracted paper, Dias and his team said they observed superconducting behavior in the rare-earth metal lutetium when mixed with hydrogen and nitrogen. Superconductivity—the unusual ability of some materials to pass electrical current without a loss of energy—is seen only at impractically low temperatures, and often also requires very high pressures.

Dias’s team purportedly showed superconducting behavior at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. They named the material “reddmatter” because, they said, it transformed from bright blue to shiny red as it was pressurized. The name was also a wink at the “red matter” substance that formed black holes in the 2009 Star Trek movie.

Scientists at once raised doubts about the new work.

When the paper was published, physicist Dirk van der Marel, an emeritus professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, citing a previous Dias superconductivity study that Nature had retracted because of concerns about the way the data had been processed and analyzed, told the Journal that “similar issues could lurk” in the new data. He was, he said, “extremely uncomfortable about the whole thing.”

Within weeks, a formal complaint made its way to Nature. Physicists Brad Ramshaw of Cornell University and James Hamlin of the University of Florida in April submitted a critique to Nature listing multiple red flags.

“We asked four questions, things that didn’t make any sense, and we were just looking for answers,” Ramshaw said.

It wasn’t the first time they had questioned Dias’s work. Hamlin reported problems in a 2021 paper by Dias and his team, published in Physical Review Letters, and Ramshaw participated in Nature’s post-publication review of a previous superconductivity paper, published in 2020. Both were retracted.

---

One question Hamlin and Ramshaw had about Dias’s latest study involved a key chart that they couldn’t reproduce with the data provided with the study. This raised questions about data presented in other parts of the paper, casting a shadow on the claim that the team had observed superconductivity. In another section of the study, they pointed to features in a graph that suggested data analysis steps had not been disclosed.

The Dias team submitted a response to these concerns, but the two critics weren’t convinced by the answers, according to documents obtained by the Journal, and earlier reported by Science. Of four questions Hamlin and Ramshaw had raised, one was potentially addressed, but “the other three issues have not been resolved,” the duo wrote to Nature.

Four reviewers who adjudicated the exchange for Nature agreed that Hamlin and Ramshaw’s critiques were relevant and that Dias and his team hadn’t explained the irregularities.

 

“We were asking some relatively simple questions about what was subtracted, and we just kept getting back this convoluted word salad,” Hamlin said. “It just made absolutely no sense.”

By the time Nature launched its own confidential investigation, similar criticisms had accumulated in public, in the comments section of the paper itself, and on the discussion board PubPeer.

In the summer, other groups reported that they had followed the methods outlined in the study to make “reddmatter,” but hadn’t seen superconductivity close to room temperature.

Another blow landed in September, days after Nature posted a public note acknowledging that the study was under review, when a majority of the study’s authors sent a letter to the journal, stating that Dias had misrepresented data and asking that the study be retracted.

Nature declined to comment on the details of the investigation.

This is at least the third retraction for Dias and his co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, within the past 14 months. Salamat is among the authors who asked Nature to retract the latest paper. Neither he nor Dias responded to requests for comment. 

Dias’s work is under investigation at the University of Rochester, a spokesperson said in October.

Write to Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com

 

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to physicist Brad Ramshaw as Ramshow. (Corrected on Nov. 7.)

https://www.wsj.com/science/superconductor-paper-retracted-journal-nature-ranga-dias-c437ce6e?mod=hp_lead_pos8

[Fudge Nuggets 19190]

On 8/29/2023 at 7:00 AM, gsoda3 said:

he was scared of being marginalized so he rushed his non-peer reviewed publication to arXiv, which over the course of covid was established as a github of sorts for the scientific community since journalistic publication, peer review, etc came grinding to a halt.  

arXiv is basically the reddit of the research community.  Anyone can pretty much post anything they want to that site and get "published".  Most of the stuff on there is total bullshit.

[ClubWhatever 12144]

8 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

arXiv is basically the surlyhorns of the research community.  Anyone can pretty much post anything they want to that site and get "published".  Most of the stuff on there is total bullshit.

 

[Bevo 13577]

On 8/28/2023 at 9:07 AM, smuggs said:

Scientific Wet Blanket is the name of my Rush cover band.

Sounds good. I am writing a rock tune called Over My Head.

[pantone159 719]

On 11/7/2023 at 10:25 AM, bschoolprof said:

oops.  Recent paper on this in Nature was retracted.  

https://www.wsj.com/science/superconductor-paper-retracted-journal-nature-ranga-dias-c437ce6e?mod=hp_lead_pos8

This is a totally different research group and 'superconducting' material, btw. These people who got their work into Nature (until it got yanked now) also claimed high temperature superconductors, but they had to do this at extremely high pressures, like between the faces of two diamonds pushed together at the maximum possible force. It would still be a big advance but it would be a long way from the normal conditions that LK-99 was supposed to work in. There was already talk about their results being questionable and having papers retracted, before the new guys claimed the LK-99 stuff that would work at normal room conditions that made much more news.

So two independent sketchy high temperature superconductor claims.

[Viper 12109]

And we're back!

 

First tweet should say "without liquid nitrogen"

 

 

[Captainant 27669]

56 minutes ago, Viper said:

And we're back!

 

First tweet should say "without liquid nitrogen"

 

 

One of the biggest challenges with validating the LK99 finding was how inconsistent their methods for creating it were, exactly along the lines of random untracked contaminations and whatnot. I hope more material science labs are able to replicate this finding - it would be world changing

[ABSR 5312]

Well I’m sure this time they have gone through a stringent peer review process before publicizing their “discovery”.   Probably Texas A&M.