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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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science
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There was a recent 'discovery' that seems to have gone very quiet already this year, iirc the results couldn't be reproduced. So I guess we have to wait and see if another team can reproduce these results. A line I found interesting was:
"The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure"
'A slight volume shrinkage' kinda sounds like the results of pressure to me? I'm not equipped to fully understand all the terms they use, but it sounds like they've found a way to apply pressure internally in the material, without using pressure in the environment.
They replaced some of the lead(II) ions with copper(II), which has a smaller ionic radius. That's why the structure would be smaller. Then they meander around other superconductor discoveries to make the argument that this volume change is the cause of the superconducting property here.
As a chemist I can't say much about the physics aspects of this paper, but the chemistry and crystallography seem reasonable. It would only take a few days to replicate the synthesis and run some of these tests on it, assuming this is real. If I ran a lab doing these things I would be doing that right now.