If there was any hope remaining that LK-99 might be a room-temperature superconductor, it’s pretty much dead now.
In fact, it’s worse than that. Pure samples of the substance show that it is an insulator — the opposite of a superconductor. The glimmers of hope that kept the story in the news for weeks appear to be the result of impurities in the original samples.
Dozens of studies published in the last week or two have coalesced around the conclusion, less than a month after a sensational preprint paper was published by a team at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a small company housed in the basement of a modest apartment building in Seoul, South Korea.
The Korean team made waves when it published preprints on July 22, claiming to have created a material that exhibited superconductor-like properties at ambient temperature and pressure. What’s more, the material was made of plebeian ingredients: lead,