Last week, a group of South Korean physicists made a startling claim. In two papers uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, they say they have created a material that “opens a new era for humankind.”
LK-99, a lead-based compound, is purportedly a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Such a material, which conducts electricity without any resistance under normal conditions, could have huge implications for energy generation and transmission, transport, computing and other areas of technology.
The papers have sparked wild enthusiasm online, and several efforts to replicate the work. At the same time, there are reports of disputes among the Korean researchers over whether the research should have been released at all.
