LK-99 and the Desperation for Scientific Discovery

An exhibitor at the Fujikura Ltd. booth demonstrates high-temperature superconductor at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) Japan exhibition in Chiba, Japan, on Monday, Oct. 15, 2018. CEATEC, an information technology and electronics trade show, will run until Oct. 19.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- LK-99 is either a once-in-a-generation scientific breakthrough, or a huge disappointment. Right now, peers and armchair experts aren't quite sure which, and the race is on to find out. The buzz shows how desperate we are for a technological discovery that could change the world.

Named after two scientists, Lee and Kim, and the year of its discovery — 1999 — LK-99 is a compound made from lead and copper. According to a paper released last month, the South Korean team have created a groundbreaking new material. A second article claims that LK-99 shows “levitation at room temperature.”

“For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure,” they wrote. The scientific world is abuzz.

Let's break that down.

The concept of a superconductor dates back over a century, and refers to a material that exhibits no electrical resistance and eliminates magnetic fields. Such a substance would be extremely energy efficient, holding a current almost in perpetuity because there's no resistance to cause dissipation through heat or light. Similar elements have been created before, but in highly-controlled conditions such as extremely low temperatures — think sub-180 Celsius (-292 Fahrenheit) — which makes them impractical. The value of an energy-efficient material is diminished when it takes a lot of power just to create the right environment, and almost lost entirely if it cannot be used in daily situations.

That's why the holy grail of materials science is to find a superconductor that persists in normal temperatures without the need to operate in some kind of pressure chamber. LK-99, if it's the real deal, could be the substance that revolutionizes industries including electronics, energy, and transport. It could pave the way for quantum computing to become a practical reality instead of a laboratory experiment.

Unfortunately, we don't yet know if it is real, a hoax, or a misunderstanding.

On July 22 two separate papers by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim were uploaded to Cornell University's arXiv pre-print server. One of those was co-authored by Young-Wan Kwon and the other included Hyun-Tak Kim, Sungyeon Im, SooMin An and Keun Ho Auh among the credits.

Academics often post research as a preprint, which means it hasn't gone through peer review or been published in a peer-review journal. This doesn't mean the work is invalid; instead this process often serves to release information expediently so that others can pick up on the research and continue the work without waiting for final publication. We saw a lot of preprint papers during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic as the medical community sought to quickly share information on the new virus.

But LK-99 isn't new, and it is not solving an urgent public-health crisis. That it was first created a quarter of a century ago shows the material has been around a while, or at least the first inklings of a recipe were known. Science sometimes moves slowly, so we needn't make too much of the time lag between first discovery and recent publication. It can take years to hone a process, then test and replicate.

Yet at least one of the authors, Hyun-Tak Kim, was reported by New Scientist as saying that one of the papers has defects and was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. This alone doesn't negate the discovery, but there's skepticism among experts, while teams in Berkeley and China have rushed to replicate the findings with early papers released in the past week indicating both groups may have been successful in confirming the results from the South Koreans.

It could take months or even years to confirm or refute these claims of having created a room-temperature superconductor. If true, it may be many more years before commercial-scale production is made possible. That reality hasn't stopped investors piling into shares of South Korean and Chinese concept stocks in the belief that new riches are around the corner.

This heated discussion — and the market response — says as much about modern times as it does science itself. The world wide web allows us to publish anything, everywhere all at once. And social media means these developments become talking points and memes even among those who barely understand the concepts.

Plenty of technological breakthroughs have offered the potential to change the world without actually doing so. Graphene, layers of carbon one atom thick, was a topic of discussion in the 1940s and was meant to revolutionize materials, electronics and batteries. Work on graphene even earned Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. It's yet to find traction today. Blockchain technology, brought to life as Bitcoin by pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, has attracted plenty of investment and discussion, but has so far failed to revolutionize finance or data storage.

The rush to publish, discuss, criticize and tear apart new discoveries works in conflict with the slow and deliberate nature of scientific research. Graphene, as a material, is still viable even if not yet commercialized, while Bitcoin will likely be an afterthought decades after blockchain technology becomes integrated into every facet of life.

LK-99 may not end up being the room-temperature superconductor we all hope for. But perhaps these findings, and renewed excitement, will lead to other advances that offer high-speed, energy-efficient trains, viable and cheap quantum supercomputers, and highly-scalable batteries to store renewable energy.

Let's embrace the excitement around LK-99, but not pin our hopes on it. The scientific journey is as valuable as the final result, and that's worth celebrating no matter the individual outcomes.