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If you ’re someone who loves an internet ballyhoo bike , good news : There ’s a new group of scientists who lay claim to have discovered a near - way - temperature superconductor .
Yes , again .
mass on X ( formerly Twitter ) , Hacker News and all the other places science fancier Wiley Post are getting run up about a new material described in a paper that was posted on Tuesday to arXiv , the pre - print waiter . ( It should be noted that most of these people do not look to be scientists let alone condense - matter physicist . ) In the theme , the Chinese squad says the material exhibits one of the property of superconductors at temperature as warm as – 23 ° C ( – 9.4 ° F ) . That ’s not room temperature , but it ’s much easier to maintain than live eminent - temperature superconductors , which have to be at around – 170 ° C ( – 274 ° F ) .
If the newspaper ’s results are what they say , that is .
It would n’t be the first meter citizenry ’s hopes were scare . Last year was a standard year for room - temperature superconductors that were n’t . The one that grabbed the most headlines — LK-99 — predominate the internetfor a few weeks over the summertime beforesuccumbing to the scientific method . Turns out it was little more than a lead - laced refrigerator magnet . Another one , detailed in a composition co - author by Ranga Dias and others , made a splash in Marchonly to be subject to aretractionin September .
This young textile break up up where LK-99 leave off , which is n’t really an auspicious starting point .
Like LK-99 , it ’s a copper - dope lead apatite , a crystalline form of spark advance contain copper . This new fabric tinkers with LK-99 ’s chemical rule a chip , tweak the proportion and adding sulfur . Those of you with exceeding memories might call back that bull sulfide was the contaminant that cave in LK-99 its bizarre properties ; once other scientists made an unpolluted sample , those properties disappear .
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The squad behind this new textile sum up the sulfur by design to make lead sulfide . They succeeded , but they also terminate up making cop sulfide . They tried to twit out the two effects , and they acknowledged that the contaminant ’s presence generated some disturbance when they went to test for superconductivity . At least the squad was transparent about that .
Another room - temperature superconductor bite the dust
If my incredulity was piqued by the material ’s law of similarity to LK-99 , it grew as I read the five - Thomas Nelson Page paper . At first , the transience gave me some pause , as did the low - reticuloendothelial system digit , which looked like they were scanned from the output of a loony toons - ground substance printer . The unmarried paragraph that describes how the squad create the material is about 100 Bible long . Concise methods are n’t regretful , per se , but broadly the more contingent , the better .
Then there ’s the data : While the squad tested for theMeissner effect , they did n’t report examination whether the material exhibited any resistance . The only reported test involved sweeping the cloth with a magnetic subject field generated by a unmediated current and observing its charismatic properties . That ’s odd because the definition of a superconductor is a cloth that carry on electrical energy without any resistivity .
Now , I ’m not a condense issue physicist , but I do have an advanced scientific degree ( meaning I ’ve read a lot of scientific papers ) , and I ’ve been a skill diarist for well over a ten ( meaning I ’ve covered a wide range of fields , include physics ) . None of what I read or escort in that paper gives me confidence that this thing is real . I ’m not alone , either : After I read the arXiv paper , Icame across postsfrom fellow science journalist Dan Garisto , who is much more qualified than me to weigh in on the matter . He ’s maybe even more questioning than I am .
I might be proven wrong — would n’t that be great , in reality ! The populace could use a superconducting material made from abundant materials that does n’t require liquid nitrogen or He to maintain its special holding . But the odds are stacked against it . Do n’t take hold your breather ( again ) .