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🧪 LK99 - The superconductor that can change the world, and the K-drama behind it!
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First of all, let me address this from the get go, I’m not a material scientist! I am pretty good at finding information in twitter’s incredibly noisy info stream. (hey, this is how I bring you AI updates every ThursdAI)
Since LK-99 is potentially groundbreaking and revolutionary, I’ve compiled a twitter list of everyone who I found credible, interested and a source of new information, and there’s now over 1.5K followers to this list alone!
Since this clearly is interesting to a lot of you, I reached out to a few prominent people on this list, and asked them to join a twitter space, to try and stitch together an update on the current state of LK-99, replication attempts, history and lore, as it stands a week after the original papers release.
If you found this interesting, you’re the type of person who wants to stay up to date, feel free to subscribe and keep this Substack alive!
First of all, let’s do some level setting. Superconductors are real, we’ve used them in MRI machines for example, but the currently available superconductors need extremely low temperature and high pressure to well.., and the promise of a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor is the holy grail of energy use.
For a breakdown on what superconductors are, and what they can mean for the world, I strongly recommend this thread from Andrew Cote (published presciently a full two weeks before the LK-99 paper) or watch this incredible breakdown:
July 22nd, the LK-99 arXiv day!
On July 22nd, two papers describing “worlds first room temperature superconductor” were uploaded to arXiv:
2307.12008 - Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Young-Wan Kwon (submitted by Kwon)
and after 2 hours and 20 minutes another paper was uploaded
2307.12037 - Sukbae Lee, Jihoon Kim, Hyun-Tak Kim, Sungyeon Im, SooMin An, Keun Ho Auh (Submitted by Hyuntak Kim)
You may notice that the first two authors on both papers are Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim, and in fact LK stands for Lee and Kim and 99 in the LK-99 name stands for the year 1999 they have started research on this.
You may also notice that YW Kwon who submitted the first paper, is not included on the second one, and in fact, is no longer part of the Quantum Energy Research Institute (Aka QCentre) where he was a CTO (he’s no longer listed on the site)
If this shakes out, and S