[badman2001]

Recent W&M Condensed Matter Physics Grad. Worked closely with HT Kim, not on this project. He is a trustworthy guy, knows his stuff. I think he is right when he calls the paper very sloppy, I am confused why there is no phase diagram and the sample purity seems suspect. These are things I think would have been addressed in peer review and would give me more confidence overall. Probably not fraud, but doesn't mean it's superconductivity.

Not optimistic about replication in the next week too, Solid State Synthesis seems "easy" but in my experience can be problematic. Not an expert in that part though

[foven]

Glad to see a realistic take on HN. Endlessly frustrating to see people be like "this will be replicated in days". Yeah, sure, let every other lab just drop what they're doing, order all the reagents on express, do a thorough characterization making sure they understand the impurities and crystal phase, then perform good airtight measurements in a couple days. Crystal growth always has complications many times outside of your control - the most minor of things can cause ridiculous problems.

Especially when they admit to having phase impurities, and it's not really clear how they've gone from bulk sample to measurement sample (are they really measuring just the superconductor or the impurity phase?). Needs addressing, especially when the Cu2S phase impurity seems to have a phase transition of it's own at or around 370K (suspiciously close to where some of their Tc measurements are).

[jncfhnb]

Feels like you’re strawmanning the idea here. It’s not “every lab” it’s “at least one lab”.

Jeez I sure hope at least one lab can spare the time to bother reproducing a room temperature semiconductor claim.

[HDThoreaun]

I mean being thorough will obviously take a long time, but if a decent number of research groups decide to drop what they're doing and attempt a replication I don't think it would take that long for one of them to at least partially succeed if the claim is true. That doesn't mean they're publishing a sister paper, but it might mean we see some tweets saying "my group synthesized LK-99 and we have reason to believe it may be a rtp superconductor"

[giarc]

>Glad to see a realistic take on HN.

From an account created 1 hour ago, claiming to have worked with the author. Take with a huge grain of salt.

[nemo44x]

To me the biggest mystery is why they didn't make multiple samples and send them to a few places that could verify their claims immediately. I understand that the papers were published before they really wanted to but they've also apparently have had samples for awhile it sounds like?

So assuming it's not BS (and I doubt that it is) it would lead me to believe that making the material is difficult to get right? The video they've produced uses a sample that isn't particularly elegant, to be sure.

I guess it's all conjecture at this point and healthy skepticism is warranted. A press conference would be nice.

[downWidOutaFite]

In the New Scientist interview HT Kim seemed to imply that he wouldn't help other researchers until his paper gets published. If the synthesis ends up being tricky this could take a while.