Community awaits verification for Korea’s new superconductor amid skepticism

An image of superconductor. [Courtesy of United States Department of Energy]

A group of South Korean researchers has recently announced a groundbreaking discovery, claiming the creation of a potential room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. However, their announcement has sparked a controversy within the scientific community over the validity of their findings, capturing global attention.

“I believe that LK-99 is a new material that exhibits superconducting properties. I already consider it validated, but since even the scientific community does not fully understand its exact nature yet, I hope that the world keeps an eye on it (until the end of this month),” Kim Hyun-tak, a research professor at the College of William & Mary in the U.S. who has been involved in the research and development of LK-99, said in a recent email interview with Maeil Business Newspaper.

His claim is that LK-99 fulfills all four requirements of a superconductor, which cannot be explained by anything other than superconductivity.

The Seoul-based Quantum Energy Research Centre Inc., which led this research, is making samples of LK-99 as part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) it signed with the Korea Institute of Energy Technology in May, according to Kim. Later this month, Lee Suk-bae, who heads the research center and co-authored two papers on the research, is expected to present their comprehensive findings by the end of this month. The scientific community is also expecting the results of cross-validation to be available around that time.

The scientific community is cautious. Various research groups at home and abroad are currently striving for verification. The Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics, which has set up an LK-99 verification committee, said that none of the announcements reported by Aug. 4 have confirmed superconductivity.

The scientific journal “Nature” also reported on Aug. 4 (local time) that the academic response to LK-99 is skeptical as there has been no direct evidence confirming superconductivity despite attempts to reproduce the material over the past few days. “Materials claiming to be room-temperature superconductors consistently appear on arXiv, an open-access archive for non-peer-reviewed electronic preprints and postprints, at least once a year,” Inna Vishik, a professor of physics and astronomy at University of California, Davis, told Nature. “But South Korea’s LK-99 does not appear to be a room-temperature superconductor.”

A superconductor refers to a material that exhibits the “Meissner effect,” where electrical resistance converges to zero and expels a magnetic field in a specific environment. This zero electrical resistance can be harnessed to eliminate the power losses that inevitably occur in the transmission and reception of electricity. The problem is that the superconducting phenomenon discovered so far only works in extreme environments, such as temperatures as low as -200 degrees Celsius and pressures as high as 1 million atmospheres.

Kim claims that LK-99 solves this problem. It exhibits superconductivity at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. LK-99 was developed by Lee and Kim, who retired from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and moved to the U.S. The Quantum Energy Research Centre was founded in 2008 by Lee, Research and Development (R&D) Director Kim Ji-hoon, and other students of the late Korea University Professor Emeritus Choi Dong-sik. They claimed that Choi passed away in 2017 and left a legacy for them to continue their research.

According to the research team, LK-99 was first discovered in 1999. The name LK-99 was derived from the surnames of Lee and Director Kim and followed by 99. Kim and Kwon Young-wan, a research professor at Korea University-Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, later joined the research team.

The LK-99 paper was first published on arXiv on July 22. The paper’s authors included Lee, R&D Director Kim, and Kwon. Kim’s name was missing.

Later, on the same day, another paper was uploaded without Kwon’s name. Six people were listed as authors, including Lee, Director Kim, Kim, and Hanyang University Professor Emeritus Oh Geun-ho. According to Kim, the first paper was published without the authors’ consent. “Professor Kwon unilaterally uploaded the paper without our consent,” said Kim. “So, the matter has been referred to the Research Ethics Committee at Korea University, and we are waiting for the committee’s decision.”

Taking all the circumstances into account, it appears that there was a disagreement among the authors. While one side uploaded the paper, the other side did so belatedly. In the meantime, the Quantum Energy Research Centre faced scrutiny when it was revealed that the research center had used the names of some of its partners on its website without permission, which raised doubts about their research’s credibility. In response, Kim said that the Quantum Energy Research Centre is “a very small venture company with only a few employees,” adding that there are many problems there.

He also refuted the claim that they are exaggerating research outcomes to attract investment. “We submitted the paper just like other researchers do,” Kim said. “We have not deliberately promoted it.” According to the information disclosed in the paper, LK-99 is made of lead, phosphorus, and sulfuric acid and takes about 53 to 68 hours to produce.