The weirdest twist in the #lk99 saga so far is a very odd Russian woman on the site formerly known as Twitter (iris_igb) liveposting an extremely kitchen meth lab kind of attempt to reproduce the process while also criticising the methods in the paper and then posting photos of a very tiny possibly levitating rock at the end.

When asked why she's doing it in the kitchen, she snaps back if they'd rather she have to take four hours of transit to the lab.

Anyways, like I said, fascinating lol.

Link to nitter of the thread: https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685265405386878977

So the brief summary of where this whole #lk99 thing is now (keeping in mind that I am not an expert on this, I am just often good at absorbing and synthesizing information I'm interested in - I am trying my best to be skeptical and represent things clearly), without links because I'm tired but it's not too hard to find things at this point:

- one of the original papers was updated on arxiv with some errors fixed and some new graphs. Apparently mildly helpful but nothing very groundbreaking. It sounds like the process described in the paper is old - from their initial attempts to replicate what might have been a somewhat accidental discovery.
- there's also patents, and those have another description of process that is slightly contradictory but may also be old.
- Allegedly there's a paper going through "proper" peer review (not the kind that's happening on the internet right now but the very formal journal process) that might have their most up to date method. They've talked about helping reproduce after that goes through review.
- conflicting reports of the original lab giving samples to other labs for characterization. MIT might have one? Unclear.
- so many reproduction attempts going on that prices on precursors has spiked. Probably limiting the number of Western labs that can do it. Chinese labs seem to just have the stuff on hand so they have a head start and there are a lot of them.
- a theoretical physics paper showed a possible explanation for how it might be superconducting using simulation software came out, but there's a lot of caveats around how it applies to the real world. It does however imply that the thermodynamically preferred chemical reaction would produce a non-superconducting crystal though, so that might explain the difficulty producing pure samples of the "good kind". The produced material is likely mostly not special.
- the first round of replications to finish (other than the Russian lady I mentioned up thread) were negative, from an Indian lab and a Chinese lab. Neither reported either diamagnetism ("floating rock") or superconductivity.
- today a *bunch* of videos out of Chinese labs have shown samples floating over magnetic fields of both polarities (diamagnetism). The samples are very small and chunky. None of those have come with successful superconducting tests but, if I understand correctly, this is hard to test with these kinds of samples because the impurity of any sample large enough to visibly show diamagnetism would also act more like a semiconductor or even a resistor.

A lot of this seems to really hinge on the likelihood of a diamagnet that is this strong and not a superconductor. There are other non-superconducting diamagnets, but they are not this strong.

Also, it's likely that if it *is* superconducting, it's a new kind. Lots of talk of "1d superconducting" which I think means that it has a high degree of directionality vs other SCs. This means that it wouldn't do the "flux pinning" thing that others do because it will slide along the flux lines rather than getting stuck in a minima. But that is an extremely lay understanding of it so don't take my word for it.

To me this looks like a "where there's smoke there's fire" kind of thing. At this point, whatever it is, it seems to be at least novel and likely to open up new avenues of research. The videos by other labs showing similar magnetic effects make fraud seem unlikely, and might already by better replications than any of the early ones that happened with the cold fusion thing in the 80s. Certainly they're more visceral and less abstract.

This is probably a good blog to keep bookmarked, though keep in mind it's only updated once a day: https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor-summary/

And this list via nitter is a decent firehose of stuff but wading through it can be.. exhausting because of random arguments breaking out and various cryptobros and similar interjecting hypey nonsense: https://nitter.net/i/lists/1684446795731206144

Now is a good time to raise your skepticism levels and assume new videos and such that are too good to be true are probably not true with #lk99.

Some fake YouTube videos are out (some pretty obvious like the one that called it "jk99" and others less so), there's a new account over there claiming to be part of a lab that has miraculous reproductions of the original paper but she doesn't say what lab and her name is that of an Indian actress that doesn't seem to exist in the academic world and her PFP and banner images don't hit in tineye (which I would expect an academic's headshot to, let alone a photo of a university building as in the banner. ML generated? What a world).

So yeah. Trolls are probably coming out in full force now and it's gonna get even harder to tell fact from fiction sadly. Doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth to be figured out somewhere in there, though.

(I do actually think the Russian lady was legit though. If she's a troll she's a very odd one)

Today's #lk99 news is an apparent replication of superconductivity....

At 110 Kelvin. Which is decidedly not room temperature (-163C). In the process they did observe a big resistance drop at a higher temp (though still relatively cold), but not to 0.

Apparently this might still be a record for atmospheric pressure, so still pretty good. And they don't exactly rule out that there's something else going on. But it is an interesting development.

Link to the video and a kind of rough translation of the transcript ("extraterrestrial super islands" presumably means "room temperature super conducting" or maybe "atmospheric pressure superconducting") in this nitter link: https://nitter.net/altryne/status/1686796796859908096

Edit: preprint of their replication paper is here https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01192

At this point, with one preprinted replication and Andrew mccalip's replication (documented pretty extensively over on twitter: https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978) it seems like if nothing else strong diamagnetism in #lk99 is basically all but confirmed.

Lots of people saying "that's not sufficient to be a superconductor" but my understanding is that even if it's not this is probably an unusually strong diamagnet (keep in mind it is heavier than graphite, which is often cited) at room temperature. That alone seems pretty significant?

Basically all the samples that have been shown to float do so at an angle and I've seen people say this both proves and disproves meisner effect specifically (the superconducting kind of diamagnetism) so I dunno what's up with that. The fact that they all do it might suggest though that that's inherent and not just because of non-superconductor parts being held down? I dunno. Not an expert.

And Iris' (the Russian lady) fast replication looks more and more credible for looking just a lot like most of the other replications but earlier, and not like the obvious hoaxes which tended to show bigger chunks to be impressive. No one but the original team has credibly shown more than a tiny fleck doing the thing so far afaik. Allegedly she's taken her samples to the physics lab of the school where she's doing her PhD and they're doing analysis on it, so that one might become more official soon too.

Oh and the original team also put out a new video of a different sample doing the thing (again at an angle) btw, with a thermometer in the video showing room temperature.

Btw the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99) has a list of current replication attempts and status', though of course the editors are bickering over what to include because what is a "collection of all knowledge" if it's not run by pedantic gatekeepers. Still it has most of them, and definitely has all the most authoritative.

To sum up, the current state seems to be: there's something here worth understanding, and it's worth more investigation. Which is very cool.