LK-99 – the good, the bad and the ugly

This summer wasn’t the scientific silly season it used to be, with the announcement of a superconductivity breakthrough. Korean researchers published their results on LK-99, a room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor. This is the holy grail of almost every technology, from energy technology to medical imaging. And a sure-bet Nobel Prize. It was published on the Arxiv repository, which allows people to upload pre-prints of their scientific papers before peer review has taken place.

Obviously, this was an open invitation for other experts in the field to try and reproduce the findings. Social media exploded with new results, a few supporting but most refuting the claims. After only a few weeks, the scientific journal Nature posited that LK-99 isn’t a ‘super-superconductor’ after all, putting an end to a month of scientific excitement and hope.