It looks truly promising, but "room temperature" in this case actually means -163C, a bit more chilly than I'm comfortable with. An excerpt:
The confirmed absence of electrical resistance now comes together with yesterday's news that confirmed at least one-half of the superconducting equation was solved: LK-99 showcased the Meissner effect (originally Meissner-Ochsenfeld), which results in the levitation of materials as they interact with the Meissner-effect-induced magnetic field. And now, it seems the other half of the equation, resistance-less electrical conduction, was verified in LK-99.
But questions remain even here: it seems that LK-99 only shows superconductivity at 110 kelvin (-163C), which disputes the "room-temperature" bit originally claimed (although all tech enthusiasts that have dabbled in liquid nitrogen cooling know that 110 kelvin is handleable, if not practical). It's also unclear why LK-99 would show both diamagnetism (responsible for levitation) and superconductivity, but within different temperature bands — expectations would paint it more as a "buy one, get two" promotion.
Yet one plus one generally being equal to two, we seem to have independent confirmation of several facets of a superconducting compound being successfully synthesized.
But while this is incredibly promising news, there are still caveats. For one: it's strange that two teams verified different halves of the superconducting requirements, but no team has successfully verified both (as of the time of writing). You would think that it would make more sense for one side to take more time to crack than the other; otherwise, why didn't the initial Meissner-effect observation also show the hallmarks of zero electrical resistance? What is stopping these teams of extremely talented individuals from achieving what others before them did in full?
In the video, Professor Yue himself says that while promising, the team's results aren't proof that LK-99 is the superconductor breakthrough we've been waiting for. For that to happen, you'd have to wait for a credible institution to confirm both the Meissner effect and the zero electrical resistance halves of the equation — at the same time. And even then, it won't be enough: their announcement (cue all other scientific prizes) will have to be followed up by other institutions up to a point where there's enough overlap in the results that says: "This is more than fabricated data or a mere fluke".
And that's not saying anything of all the sweet spots this material needs to hit to be the hero we want it to be. It has to be abundant enough and easy enough to access that it's relatively cheap to mine; then it has to be relatively cheap to process and synthesize at a mass scale; and then it still has to be turned into actually useable bits of electronics that are compatible enough with our current fabrication methods. Talk about high standards; that's years of work right there.
For now, LK-99 seems to have some limitations. It's currently hard to synthesize at high purities (because it only happens in very specific areas of the compound), meaning yield is likely to be poor. And in fact, perhaps this purity problem (acknowledged in the original paper) is the root of most of these issues: scientists have had a difficult time creating enough quantities of the material that display any of the superconducting or diamagnetic features. There could be unknown factors at play at a chemistry level that explain the low yield, but if that's true, then we can't really trust the replicability of the results just yet.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/scramble-to-validate-superconductor-breakthrough-confirms-zero-resistance-with-a-catch
It looks truly promising, but "room temperature" in this case actually means -163C, a bit more chilly than I'm comfortable with. An excerpt: