Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetism
This further confirms the existing discourse around sample makeup and quality, the video, to me at least, looks like a large flake of inert material attached to a smaller whiteish looking bit of reactive material at one end of the flake, each time it’s demonstrated that end of the sample is the end that moves and the rest of it looks like it’s hanging down… the same sort of thing we saw with the original demonstration with the larger lopsided sample in the very first publication on by the QCenter original Korean researchers…<p>As I said in an earlier post on another article, smash the samples… let’s see some clear unambiguous levitation of small grains with little dead weight, this process is clearly not yet refined enough to give large samples of high enough quality to visibly demonstrate levitation… several of the existing failures to replicate could actually just be failures to have a high enough ratio of superconducting to normal mass and thus no levitation… these powered based bulk material processes are tricky as hell, even when you aren’t trying to modify the chemical properties and do reactions it can be hard to get <i>structural</i> cohesion of samples and a lot of dry powder based ceramic products have had notoriously bad quality control issues… we “mastered” wet clay ceramics thousands of years ago, yet depending on what your trying to do, something as “simple” as dry ceramic sintering can be challenging!<p>I don’t think a lot of the researchers rushing to perform replication are being sufficiently <i>thoughtful</i> about the nature of the samples they are producing. They are smart capable people who potentially have very little powder process knowledge or may have it from a background where this sort of thing isn’t as important… heck I only have my knowledge of this stuff from research into ultra high temperature ceramics for use in rocket engines, where poor powder process control can affect the structural and thermal properties and lead to all sorts of erosions cracks and other kinds of material degradation and sample destruction… so yeah I don’t expect all these teams to fully understand the challenges of powder based solid chemistry and I think we are seeing it brought out in the <i>visible evidence</i> we’ve seen posted online.<p>Also… It’s interesting how often people are using the same new AI  powered video translation service … which I’d literally never heard of before the initial release and some of the interested parties using it to translate the original Korean information. Everyone following along has heard of this service now and it seems to be a happy accident that they are getting publicity and interest from being associated with the community gathering around the internet to follow LK-99 related work!