Last week, South Korean scientists claimed to have developed a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, called LK-99. It's hard to overstate how important this discovery would be. Just a few of the applications:
- Faster electronics
- Cheaper medical tech
- Improved quantum computing
- Frictionless transportation
- Massively improved energy efficiency
- Massively improved batteries
One can imagine a discovery of this type being a major contributor to solving climate change.
The problem is that many experts are extremely skeptical about whether these scientists have actually done what they claim. The discovery was published in a "preprint," and so has not been independently reviewed or verified. And there have been many debunked claims of ambient temperature/pressure superconductors in the past.
In other words: Huge, if true.
So the race is on for other laboratories to try to replicate the South Koreans' results to see if their claim is true. The implications of this story are so big, it pays to monitor developments in either debunking or verifying it.
The prestigious journal Science has published a blog post with some positive developments. Its author actually says he is "guardedly optimistic."
There are (unverified) reports that scientists in China have replicated the results.
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