Scramble to replicate supposed room temperature and pressure superconductor

An eyebrow-raising claim to have produced the first room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor has sparked both excitement and scepticism in the scientific community. The race is now on to replicate these results with several groups already releasing preprints of their efforts just days after the claim came to widespread public notice.

The supposedly-superconducting material ‘LK-99’ is named after two of its discoverers Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim, affiliated to the Quantum Energy Research Centre in Korea, and the year of its synthesis, 1999. Reports of LK-99’s room temperature and pressure superconductivity appeared in two preprints on the arXiv server in late July with a paper attributed to three authors, Lee, Kim and Young-Wan Kwon at Korea University in Seoul.