LK-99 Is the Superconductor of the Summer
Well, it&#x27;s officially mainstream. No chance of this remaining an academic story if it fails to replicate now.<p>Just a reminder: it could take months to a year to figure out whether this is legit. Contrary to initial impressions from the (terrible, full of holes) included methodology, the synthesis process is actually difficult (not gigapascal diamond anvil difficult, but not just baking store bought powder in a furnace then squeezing either). A successful replication could happen at any moment, but one not happening until six months or more from now is very possible too, and isn&#x27;t a death knell for the material (or the material family).<p>We normally aren&#x27;t exposed to scientific research this early in the process. There are a lot of alleged dramatic reasons for why we are in this case being exposed to the research before the original team wanted us to be, as well as COVID normalising people taking arXiv preprints far more seriously (for completely understandable reasons). Also, while I don&#x27;t agree with this scientific philosophy at all on principle, this is coming out of a commercial lab and I have no idea whether and to what extent they are willing to share samples&#x2F;invite outside teams into their labs, considering they are likely attempting to monetise this as much as possible (I hate this mindset, hope it fails!).<p>The wildcard here is citizen scientists (including a particular Soviet molecular biologist) and the various labs around the world that are trying to replicate. With how bad the methodology documentation is many labs will probably fail to replicate if just looking at that (but Li Liu et al of Beihang U, that XRD pattern really should have made you look a lot closer at whether you&#x27;d successfully synthesised), I don&#x27;t know what the odds are on outside labs being able to replicate without much better information on methodology and materials. It could end up not being feasible until the original research team offers more help, and while they&#x27;re offering some help now they&#x27;ve also implied they want to get their paper published first before really opening up (this part is normal).<p>Just going to be a waiting game. If you want to follow the drama and find the citizen science&#x2F;&quot;It&#x27;s so over... We&#x27;re so back!!!&quot; saga entertaining, then definitely follow the accounts on Twitter that are doing that. If you just want to know whether we have peer-reviewed,  reputably published, replicated results confirming RTAPS, then you just have to wait it out until academia resolves this over the next year.