Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt
Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn't this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they'd apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don't believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn't expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.I don't know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it's not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers/"makers" attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).