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Room-temperature and pressure superconductor discovered. It's not peer-reviewed, published, or replicated yet--what do you guys think the odds are that this is legit?
They have a website, a partially-linked and far more professional looking second paper, and a this video, and this less janky one. It's not obviously cranks coming out of the woodwork.
The Hirsch-Diaz feud and grifting's primed me to expect a lot of process-level-jank at best whenever new claims of high-temperature superconductivity come about, but this looks like it would either have to be incredibly overt fraud, the real thing, or some new electromagnetic behavior that would itself be very noteworthy if not as big a deal (eg, unusually high diamagnetic forces for a lead-copper compound, or even compared to graphites). You get a lot of current and resistance measurement problems with thin films, but the magnetic behavior is something different.
The biggest wierdness is how extremely simple the synthesis is. This isn't the first 'supermaterial' I've seen with the sort of production process that would be too easy for the Applied Science guy, but even if the process is picky as fuck and the yield tiny, these guys have a problem. If it's a fraud, a ton of materials labs will have disproved it by the weekend; if it's not, they're got patents on a material that are going to be Very Interesting to enforce. And not just for the 'you and what army' problems: if this approach works I don't see any clear reasons it'd be the only one.
EDIT: I'm seeing play-money bets around 15-30%, and I'd probably put some petty cash on the higher range, maybe 20-25% real, ~20% intentional fraud, remainder some incredibly specific measurement error or new weird thing. Which probably sounds a little pessimistic, but given how fucky this field's big names are, that's relatively impressed. The corporate stuff is still sketchy, though, and they're looking at indirect-enough measurements that "just amazingly diamagnetic" is definitely an option.
EDIT2: Even if true, I will note that all the critical currents are low so far. May be a production artifact, but if insurmountable would prevent some useful applications, especially if it can't scale up or can't scale up at reasonable costs. Still would be important.
EDIT3: Looks like they have one paper published in a (tiny) peer-reviewed journal on this already, albeit primarily in Korean and looking at lower-if-still-roomish-temps. I've got a low enough opinion on peer review that I don't think it changes much. Sorta thing you might do if trying to bilk naive investors as much as if serious.
If this turns out to be true it will be hilarious, I mean the first room temperature super conductor is an easy to synthesize material discovered by some Korean academics no one had ever heard of before! I mean their website isn’t even working right now.
Oh, yeah, there's absolutely a ton of hilarious stuff going on, including some drama. I'm still pessimistic, but the perversity of the universe trending to a maximum might even work in its favor, here.
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