Talk:LK-99 - Misplaced Pages

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Archives

Archive 1

Authors

There is some speculation that the reason for multiple papers dropping in such a short-time is because of credit in-fighting for additional (third) authors beyond Lee & Kim:

@8teAPi (2023-07-27). "The papers were not ready … Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since … 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee … stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials … 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it. … YH Kwon, … is parachuted in to babysit … Lee becomes CEO, Kwon CTO and Kim the Research Director … figure out a production process, … in 2021. … bring on board HyunTak, … from the College of William and Mary. Patent filing … in 2022 and March 2023. Kim starts to get nervous that they'll get scooped. … HyunTak insists more work on characterization is needed before publishing. It's Saturday 22 July 5pm in Korea. YH Kwon logs on to arxiv and pushes a paper from the Korea team. It lists Lee Kim and Kwon as the third author. No one else is listed. … A Nobel can be shared by 3 people. … 2.30 am in Virginia HyunTak gets a ping from his Korean contact. He rushes out his paper, by 6am that morning. It lists Lee, Kim and himself as the third author, along with 3 others, conspicuously leaving YH Kwon out of the picture" (Tweet) – via Twitter.

‒Sladen (talk) 08:48, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I can't find proof that the Hanyuang University affiliation of Keun Ho Auh is legitimate: https://www.hanyang.ac.kr/search/search.jsp?tabId=univ&query=Auh%252C+Keun+Ho&search_name=&selectVal=1&search=Auh%252C+Keun+Ho

-Alexanderlkaplan (talk) 13:40, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

User:Alexanderlkaplan: According to the Academy of Sciences bio, Auh joined the University in 1983, and is a Professor Emeritus. Using the Hanyang University search page, and searching by name ("오근호") displays their name and role ("오근호 명예교수"), and email address. —Sladen (talk) 18:06, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Awesome thank you! 2600:1017:B82F:C79F:4D63:EB96:825F:B533 (talk) 04:03, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

MOS:CLAIMED

Two edits in Special:Diff/1167517849/1167516509 removed use of the citation {{r|padavic-c-20230726}} (causing a syntax error) and introduced new wording at odds with MOS:CLAIMED in the Misplaced Pages Manual of Style. These have been temporary reverted in Special:Diff/1167521503. (Would encourage Osunpokeh to attempt their edits again in a way that do not break the page or introduce problematic wording.) —Sladen (talk) 07:31, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Many secondary sources are using the word "claimed" or "is claiming" so don't be scared to use it here too. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:53, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, such statements (if necessary) can be specifically quoted and attributed to an individual. The phrasings added by the posted diff were "Media reports … mentioned" and "Scientists speculated that" (ie. WP:VAGUE, WP:WEASEL). —Sladen (talk) 09:23, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

"And it is at this point that we have an entirely new physics..."

Reflecting on articles about various miracle-cure physics and science articles: we could use a style for tagging / talking about claimed advances that deviate dramatically from existing models, with limited intervening discoveries or confirmed theoretical underpinning. <longer style rant + comments moved to User:Sj/miracles> – SJ + 09:17, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

From the comment: "Multiple dimensions of breakthrough at once " No at atmospheric pressures there are many known superconductors at liquid nitrogen temperatures. There are known superconductors at high pressures (beating temperature records for atmospheric pressure superconductors), but those are much less practical than low temperatures. "Improvements that are too good to be true: an order of magnitude improvement over the state of the art, all at once." The original discovery of High-temperature superconductors was a sudden discovery of superconductivity in copper oxides (yes not such a huge increase in temperature for the 1986 discovery but still a massive breakthrough). I'm not saying whether or not this will pan out or not, but we should wait for others to attempt to replicate it, not add categories calling it pseudoscience or anything like that before it had a chance to be properly investigated. 2607:FEA8:E31F:D2C6:98B4:8359:E774:D7B7 (talk) 23:10, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Re: categories, I meant we can categorize this as something like "alleged breakthrough" and not "high-temperature superconductor" while still unconfirmed; not adding claims of pseudoscience. This avoids prematurely give credence to an untested claim.

Yes, YBCO was a magnificent breakthrough -- but built on LBCO and known mechanisms. And you are right, we do have many ambient-temp superconductors; high pressure is needed to overcome a limitation that this particular compound may not need. That idea is clear from the theory in their initial papers; though the new LBNL preprint provides a much more thorough + plausible explanation. – SJ + 09:17, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Virality

Scientific American calls out the virality of this science reporting , which I think is notable and kind of bends the rules being discussed above. Is adding a "viral news" section a good idea? It seems dumb to leave it out. But then do we use the less-reliable sources, such as Vice (who also note the virality), AutoEvolution and Country & Town House just as examples? ☆ Bri (talk) 18:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

The Garisto piece in Scientific American is included in LK-99#Further reading section, which is probably a reasonable compromise. —Sladen (talk) 18:45, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

… other editors have cited the Garisto article now, so it is in LK-99#References …despite only using Fahrenheit! —Sladen (talk) 21:29, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

The article focuses too much on July for it not to be mentioned, yeah. 85.147.66.47 (talk) 22:19, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Elusiveness of negative results

2607: above suggested we would know soon whether this has "panned out or not". This may be true if there are a series of positive results. But if there are only negative results, this is unlikely, as negative claims are hard to prove. Some of the developments that might be expected even if results are negative for weeks:

Inconclusive support

Through confirmation bias and multiple comparisons, a number of others will also find potentially weakly-supporting evidence of the desired outcome
- One or two labs will report they have a partial replication but will not publish their results, perhaps "to double check that their results are correct". They may never publish anything, but that initial statement can keep hope alive for years.
- Some replicators will report instances that they claim show weakly statistically significant support for the breakthrough claims, or at least for one signal. Rather than taking extra care to rule out sources of error, or making sure they can replicate their own experiment under a range of setups and initial conditions, they will only note that as an intended followup. (This followup may take years, or for various reasons may never happen, or never be reported as widely as the initial hopeful result.)
- A small community of enthusiasts will start doing casual replications and reporting their results, again without sparing too much thought for the implications of multiple comparisons.
- Someone will produce an informal meta-study of results from these three groups that show any positive indicators for the hoped-for result. They will come up with theories about what those experimental setups had in common that "got it right", leading to another round of experiments.

Inconclusive disconfirmation

The most careful replication efforts will not succeed. But lack of success isn't the same as failure - maybe they didn't do it carefully enough!
- Many groups w/ varying experimental precision will try to replicate the work. None of them will have obvious success, or will confirm non-superconductivity explanations for early observations
- The discoverers will come up with novel reasons, based on new unknown physics, why this is a sign that this material is still close to a superconductor, and the space of similar materials should be searched even more carefully. They will be more sure than ever that their approach will work, and will continue patenting and fundraising for an expanded effort.
- The discoverers will update their method to address specific arguments against their approach, and to make even purer samples. They may start to cite the positive facets of inconclusive results from others, or the informal meta-study, in slide decks.
- Through citogenesis, this can be glossed as "the latest breakthrough, which could revolutionize society, that needs replication and further confirmation" without independent confirmation of method, underlying theory, or observation of the expected core results; and also without the discoverers even developing an unambiguous demonstration they can show to other experts in their field.

– SJ + 20:53, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Related comment by Sabine Hossenfelder - Wild guess: the first reproduction attempts will find the material isn't sc, there will be some discussion about whether the stuff was synthesized correctly, then we'll never hear about it again.

Partial success: style

Right now we have three partial success entries in the replication table. All have shown video of a tiny and thin flake, which is perhaps 100x lighter than the object shown w/ partial levitation in the initial paper. Pablogelo has glossed them as 'Preliminary results unavailable' and not 'partial success' which seems right, since this is a minimal result, with no data shared beyond grainy video. (Also: all labs tried to produce much larger quantity than those flakes, so there is likely be a reason they're all showing such tiny pieces through a magnifying glass; we should assume that larger fragments don't show this property. Also, none have showed their flakes alongside flakes of known diamagnets like graphite for comparing strength of interaction.) – SJ + 17:08, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Other apatite superconductors?

Do we know any other high-temperature, low-pressure superconductors with an apatite structure?

If this is another novel aspect of the claim, then it seems important to mention. But Google isn't helping me figure out if it's novel. Thanks, Bernanke's Crossbow (talk) 01:49, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe so, see File:Timeline of Superconductivity from 1900 to 2015.svg Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:33, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know that's also novel. This is part of the idea -- the new material works in such a different physical regime because its an entirely new mechanism. I agree it's worth mentioning, see if you can find a published analysis that addresses how different this is from past approaches. – SJ + 17:52, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Critical current

I was going to add a Fermi estimate of the critical current to the page, but I've concluded that the amount of guesswork required pushes it from WP:CALC to WP:OR. Lest the work go to waste, though, here's my notes:

Figure 6 in the six-author paper shows critical currents of about 0.3 A. But what size sample are they using?
"Materials and Methods" in the three-author paper talks about measurements on samples of size 40 mg and 60 mg; I'll assume these are typical and go with 60 mg for safety. This site gives a (computed) density of plumbous phosphate as about 7 g/cm. I'll assume LK-99 isn't that different.
Now smush the numbers together until the units cancel:
(0.3 A)((60 mg)/(7 g/cm)) = 7 A/cm
Wolfram|Alpha informs me that this is the typical gate leakage in a computer processor 15 years ago, or about half the current density in an electromotor brush.

Bernanke's Crossbow (talk) 02:13, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Draft:Hyun-Tak Kim

I created a draft for Hyun-Tak Kim. I’m unsure if there is enough out there to demonstrate notability. Any help would be appreciated. Thriley (talk) 19:45, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

@Thriley: Currently there is no claim of importance. But if you add the connection to LK-99 that should do for that. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:46, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

He is the most well-known member of the team from academia, not for the superconduct but for MIT theory. YouKnowOne (talk) 06:18, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

He certainly has a distinguished enough career to be notable; but there isn't a lot of English-language detail about his past work and life. More relevant for a bio stub would be a summary of that past work, affiliations, &c. – SJ + 09:17, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Looks like Htkim580711 edits Misplaced Pages (and answers questions on Quora), so you could ask him directly. – SJ + 15:28, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Theoretical foundation

For future inclusion we should careful watch the developments concerning this pre-print by Sinéad Griffin: Griffin, Sinéad M. "Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-substituted lead phosphate apatite". arXiv:2307.16892.. See announced it via this tweet: Sinéad Griffin (August 1, 2023). "" (Tweet) – via Twitter.. WatkynBassett (talk) 04:26, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's lovely work – there's nothing like a nice, clean one-author paper. Added to the theory section. It's also in the 'replication' table even though it's not quite that. – SJ + 09:17, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

ITN nomination criteria

If the claims of this discovery are verified, this would very likely be something that would posted as a news item in ITN. I'm looking to get a few opinions on when that should be — what burden(s) of verification do we consider before we trust the result to an ITN-worthy degree? 06:05, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

This is not ITN material. Atleast not till a good few month passes by when the claims can be replicated at multiple venues (or not). TrangaBellam (talk) 07:35, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Three reliable, independant institutions that firmly confirm the presence of superconductivity at room temperature and pressure.

Getting reliable news sources to cover the replication by these insitutions as reliable helps.

As of today, all RS are still skeptical. Skeptical superconductor claims are not newsworthy. 85.147.66.47 (talk) 11:19, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Osunpokeh, hold that ITN listing until next year's award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Lee, Kim & Chair ;-)! —Sladen (talk) 17:28, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Links to translated video?

For work like the latest Huazhong University levitation video (original in Chinese), where the source video doesn't have translation, how should we link to a subtitled version? Some people have used their own tools to generate subtitles on the video, and reposted the result; we end up linking to a semi-random person's repost. That's much more useful for people reading the article, but harder for editors to confirm the translation is correct.

This is one area where on-wiki tools for automatic captioning and translation would be fantastic. – SJ + 09:17, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Taking about the videos, why is one of the Southeast U video tagged as Template:Original research while the Huazhong video is not? Both are videos in Chinese how do we know they are not both original research?--ReyHahn (talk) 09:35, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Good question. I removed the tag for that video, it's clearly of the cited professor. I assume OR here referred to inference that the source was the claimed person (contra the 'verified authors' note for the paper from India). – SJ + 14:39, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Other less reliable replication reports

Removed two lines from the article (no information on the researcher, lab, or any followup; minimal detail in videos). Please add any other questionable replication reports here; we can check on them to see if they have published anything more serious. See also this Wordpress and this forum thread for sporadically-updated lists. – SJ + 17:29, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I am wondering if the inclusion of the CSIR-NPLI attempt is inappropriate. Little or no secondary coverage, and the paper itself seems specious; the authors write "urther, our sample is not spongy as being reported in ref. 1. Rather it looks, as the same is slightly melted and reacted with quartz tube." Is it misleading to include this as having tested the material in question per se? Moonjail (talk) 22:07, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

They published a full preprint, which is better than most. Certainly not inappropriate; we have no idea about the method of any of the others, often showing the smallest of material fragments, easily 100x smaller than the chunk used for the original paper. – SJ + 00:09, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

I would argue that these likewise fail WP:N and WP:RS absent secondary coverage. Indeed, arXiv is perennially discussed and considered generally unreliable on its own. Given the extraordinary nature of the claims in question, few if any of these seem to merit inclusion in advance of peer review, and it seems premature to give the appearance of comparing them in quality.

Mitigating claims of "subject matter expertise" ought to have an especially high burden where novel physics is concerned. The initial papers that are the subject of the article are unique in that their notability is a product of this inherent controversy, and they have received substantial secondary attention as a result. The same cannot be said for the papers in response.

I am merely particularly concerned about reliability and relevance where authors openly admit that the composition of their final sample may have been complicated by an apparent side reaction. Moonjail (talk) 01:30, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Added 2 questionable replication reports as per request to do so. ShotoKye (talk) 23:14, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Group	Country	Status	Result	Notes
University of Science and Technology of China	China	Results unavailable	8/1: Video showing diamagnetism of small sample.	Video uploaded to Zhihu.
Qufu Normal University	China	Results unavailable	8/1: Video showing diamagnetism of small sample.	Video uploaded to Zhihu.
Iris Alexandria	Russia	Results unavailable	Photograph of small sample levitating in glass tube.	Results shared via Twitter. Junior Researcher for the Institute of Gene Biology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Institute of Strength Physics and Materials Science SB RAS	Russia	Results unavailable	Recording of small sample levitating.	Recording uploaded to YouTube.

Please remember to avoid using primary sources

A tweet, facebook, bilibi, youtube isn't a reliable source and should be avoided when updating this article, multiple users are forgetting it when editing the section on replications, please refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources I would suggest a mod to watch that section more thoroughly and a clean-up is needed — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pablogelo (talk • contribs) 17:10, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Agreed that we must be careful. Primary sources do suffice to demonstrate 'X claims Y'. We still have to decide which such claims are notable enough to include. I don't think it should be enough that someone claims to be in a lab from a notable institution. But a verified member of a lab by a notable researcher in a related field, who is posting regular updates, seems sufficient to confirm that a replication is happening at that lab, and to include in the table. On balance I think including the "original research" inline flag for those lines is a fine comrpomise, until that lab publishes something more formal about their method + results. – SJ + 17:29, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

"Original research" means the Misplaced Pages editor is the source. That's probably not what you want. Maybe {{better source needed}} instead. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:31, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

References

"韩国研究人员声称发现常压室温超导材料，具体情况如何？可信度有多高？". www.zhihu.com. Retrieved 2023-08-01.
"LK-99材料尝试复现 - 知乎". www.zhihu.com. Retrieved 2023-08-01.
Ferreria, Becky; Pearson, Jordan (2023-08-01). "DIY Scientists and Institutions Are Racing to Replicate the Room-Temperature Superconductor". www.vice.com. Vice News. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
@iris_IGB (July 31, 2023). "I am from IGB RAS, Junior Researcher!" (Tweet). Retrieved 2023-08-02 – via Twitter.
"Demonstration of the Meissner effect in the LK99 superconductor at room temperature". www.youtube.com. 2023-08-01. Retrieved 2023-08-02.

I've been turning to this article a few times a day for the past few days, and one reason is that it's the only place where one can get a broad sense of where various replication efforts stand. I presume that in due course, we'll want to tighten up the sourcing, but I just want to make the case that in a fast breaking story of such potential importance, it's more ok than normal that we accept sources that meet some basic sanity-check standards even if we know that as the facts become clearer over time, a lot of these preliminary reports won't be all that important to keep.

I fully agree with this sentiment by Moonjail: "Indeed, arXiv is perennially discussed and considered generally unreliable" in terms of Misplaced Pages claiming that there has or has not been successful replication. So we should be very clear to readers about that. But at the same time, it is of encyclopedia interest that such-and-such reputable person from such-and-such reputable lab claimed thus-and-so. Because of the lack of peer review, the nature of arXiv as a source is similar to that of a tweet by a politician if you see what I mean - that a politician tweeted it, doesn't mean that it's true, but it can be of encyclopedic interest that they did tweet it. WP:Twitter is a useful though obviously imperect analogy.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:26, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Remove "First tangible use of quantum mechanics in superconductivity" section?

There are a few major issues with this section. First, the description of the quantum wells is already covered under Proposed Mechanism. The additional information this section provides doesn't seem to be accurate -- the source appears to be a blog post which isn't adding much to the article and isn't very reliable. Moreover, it doesn't seem to contain much of the information in this section. The claim that electron spins become "synced" would seem to me to imply that the Cooper pairs are in a triplet state, which I've seen no evidence of and which isn't backed-up by the source. The source also doesn't say anything about electrons behaving as "pure energy," which seems to me to be a misunderstanding of what entanglement means.

Since the important information about the alleged superconducting quantum well behavior is already covered above, I think it's best to just remove this section. Fourmatter (talk) 17:36, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

We need to fully describe the timeline

This: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15bfhq7/there_is_a_third_lk99_paper_with_much_better/

and all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzL9cS3VW8

and all the interviews. Valery Zapolodov (talk) 18:30, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Feel free to make edits in the appropriate section, or to suggest specific changes here. The publishing timeline already includes the third paper and (afaict) everything Sabine mentions. – SJ + 21:20, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Nimo Rotem

Please stop adding text referencing Nimo Rotem. He admitted on Facebook (before deleting the post, just moments ago) that what his video shows is not LK-99 but “a mix of metal powders and a binder” which he at refers to as “JK-99”. DES (talk) 22:38, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

"Status" Column is confusing

different phrases have the same color while the same phrase also has a different color, I guess the color is based on outcome but wouldn't it be smarter then to color the "Result" Column? Littlerootlodge (talk) 08:39, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

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