Making sense of the room-temperature superconductor claim from South Korea Premium

LK-99: this is the name that a group of South Korean scientists named Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Young-Wan Kwon have conferred to a material that is – they recently reported – a superconductor at room temperature and pressure. The material is a copper-doped lead apatite, a type of phosphate mineral.

The name is 99. LK-99!

This is the name that a group of South Korean scientists namedSukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon have conferred to a material that is – they recently reported – a superconductor at room temperature and pressure (in preprint papers available here and here). The material is a copper-doped lead apatite, a type of phosphate mineral.

While the labels ‘L’ and K can commonsensically be traced to the initials of the three scientists, the number 99 continues to be a bit of a puzzle (although some have associated it with the year of its discovery). Nonetheless, the significance of christening this claimed novel apparently-superconducting material after themselves cannot be lost. If indeed independent scientists are able to confirm that LK-99 is an ambient-condition superconductor, the scientists will have etched their names in history in more than just the material’s moniker.

The scientists’ claim has unsurprisingly caught the community of physicists by storm. We are taught as early as middle school that an electric current carried by a metal wire suffers losses owing to the wire’s electrical resistance. Indeed, a significant amount of electricity generated in power plants is lost in transmission for this reason. What if we could make materials that would offer no resistance to current flow?

Scientists discovered such materials more than a century ago. They found that elemental mercury, a liquid metal at ambient conditions, becomes a superconductor at an unimaginably cold temperature of -268 degrees Celsius. Years of painstaking research revealed that superconductivity is a rather common phenomenon in metals if they can be cooled down to similar temperatures.

In fact, in the late 1970s, scientists believed that we can’t have a superconductor at more than -240 degrees Celsius, which is well below the liquefaction temperature of nitrogen, -195 degrees Celsius. At the same time, it became clear that superconductors aren’t just perfect conductors of electricity – they also have many other exotic properties, as a result of their unique quantum nature. Physicists are currently using these exotic properties to help build, among other things, quantum computers and other sophisticated devices that could change the course of human evolution.

Against this background, the paramount importance of discovering a material that is a superconductor in ambient conditions should be evident.