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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Just by looking at the authors, this is not real:
Of the three, the first author (and corresponding author) and second author claim Q-centre as affiliation. If you check the webpage, it is not a research lab but just a commercial company selling this as a product. The third author claims KU-KIST as affiliation, but the only one I can find in google scholar has no background on superconductivity at all, and actually I can't even find them as a current faculty member of KU-KIST.
If you look at the other paper they have in arxiv about the same, list of authors from the same Q-Centre, plus a last author from Hanyang university, but researchgate shows him as last publishing in 2006, so I assume long time retired by now. Not in the field of superconductors either.
I am looking for other work from any of the authors, and I can find none. Science is an incremental process, with some breakthroughs, sure, but incremental. Cancer won't be cured in a day, and room temperature ambient pressure superconductors won't just happen out of nowhere. Even room temperature superconductors at very high pressures aren't really a thing, as the recent retractions of Ranga Dias' papers shows.
As an aside, here is an interesting talk about the work that went into showing that the data was manipulated in those high-pressure room-temperature superconductor papers - as much as papers with manipulated data are a terrible thing for science, the fact that people will go to these lengths to prove them wrong is very reassuring. A paper that is wrong only misleads for a while, actual science pushes through and buries it eventually.
There is no room for a mistake or massaging data here. The authors have photos and video of magnetic levitation. It is either outright fraud, or true. You are claiming without evidence that these people intentionally faked the paper and it is entirely made up (which could well be true, but is a much stronger claim than shoddy statistical analysis, and much easier to prove).
As to prior work. All three authors have previous publications on perovskites. If the trick for room temperature superconductivity turns out to be putting a low temperature superconducting material in a crystal lattice where it doesn't have enough room (which is a concept consistent with existing literature), then it seems reasonable that a perovskite researcher would discover it first as there is not really any special knowledge of superconductivity beyond the basics required (ie. The what is exceedingly simple if it turns out it works, the how is hard and is not the domain of a superconductivity expert).
Extraordinary claims and all that, but none of your criticisms are valid.
Can you link me to their prior work? I could not find it. I did check Q-centre and it is a commercial page selling this material as a product. This is a scam, not the biggest breakthrough of the century (until/unless we get working fusion power plants).
Just click through the links on the names. A decent number of them were actually published in reputable journals (the ones with doi links). On second glance there's a decent amount of superconductor stuff there too.
If it is fraud, it's very deliberate fraud (the website is sketchy as hell so could easily be).
https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
There is no way that is diamagnetic or ferromagnetic levitation unless the "magnet" under it is actually several magnets in different orientations or there are other magnets deliberately hidden out of frame. The sketchy website and lack of any public facing claims actually bodes well in my book. Fraudsters generally don't limit the video to an obscure link.
Given how simple the reproduction is, we should see a reproduction or some debunking within a few weeks.
Just by clicking on Arxiv I see lists of people with similar names, but if you look specifically for them they are only on this paper and the sibling paper with the levitation: Sukbae, Kim and Young-Wan. Kim is also on the other paper without the dash in his name.
Searching in scholar, researchgate, web of science, I cannot find anything.
I have checked out the levitation video, but I see no levitation there, just a magnetized thing with low mass. The typical Meissner effect levitation is done by cooling from above Tc, while keeping your superconductor separated from the magnet a small distance. The flux lines get pinned once you cool down below Tc and you can remove your spacer leaving your SC levitating. This is not that.
In any case, I fully agree with your last sentence: The fabrication procedure is simple enough that anyone that wants to replicate it, can do so. I really would love to be proven wrong, ambient SC would be an absolute civilization changer, but I don't think this is anything of the sort.