The LK-99 superconductor, a dream that is not yet real

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Within the scientific community there are wishes that have not yet been achieved. For a century we have sought to find a superconductor that works at room temperature. Superconductors are materials that allow the flow of electrical energy without resistance. If achieved, advances such as lossless electrical power transmission, levitating trains, nuclear fusion reactors for commercial use, improvements in medical imaging, and miraculous quantum computers could be achieved .

In recent days, a group of South Korean scientists announced that they have a recipe for the coveted material. According to them, their LK-99 is a superconductor that operates above room temperature and at normal (atmospheric) pressure, some Phone Number List thing that has never been seen before. This news raised doubts in other groups that also investigate this field. The reason is that the papers published in the arXiv repository appear to be inaccurate. These papers have not been reviewed by other scientific experts, but the research has already been subjected to scientific scrutiny and the results are discouraging. For example, physicists from different parts of the world reproduced the famous LK-99 of the South Koreans, but none could detect superconductivity under the conditions they indicated.

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Luis Antonio Pérez , of the Chemical Physics department of the UNAM Physics Institute, says that the evidence presented by scientists at the South Korean Quantum Energy Research Center is not clear. Although the physical mechanism that would give rise to superconductivity at room temperature is not understood, the scientific community is clear about the minimum requirements to “claim victory.”

The Mexican researcher explains that superconductors are materials that can conduct electric current without resistance below a certain critical temperature, which depends on each material. However, these critical temperatures are generally extremely low. Edgar Berrospe , an electrical engineer and postdoctoral fellow at the Montreal Polytechnic, details that superconductivity was discovered in 1911, but the first to show this behavior did not have practical applications because they needed to be cooled with liquid helium, to a temperature of minus 269 degrees Celsius.



In 1986, the first high critical temperature superconductor was found. In this context, "high temperature" refers to temperatures close to minus 196 degrees Celsius, explains Berrospe. He adds that this achievement made it possible to use liquid nitrogen to reach such temperatures. This revived interest in superconductivity from engineering and led to the imagination of new applications in medicine and Big Science , beyond the Nb-Ti used in the CERN particle accelerator.

Currently, Pérez describes, in the field of physics it is considered that a material becomes superconducting when its electrons, which are responsible for conducting electricity, form pairs. Electrical resistance occurs when individual electrons collide with the vibrations of atoms in the material. However, when certain materials are at low temperatures, electrons form pairs that are not affected by these vibrations, which are less intense in the cold. This allows the pairs to move freely through the material, thus carrying the electric current.