LK-99

The prospects of LK-99, the controversial substance that its discoverers claim is a room temperature superconductor, living up its hype are dimming. In recent days, many scientists have synthesized the substance and published studies showing that it does not have superconductive properties, at least in the form that they tested it. However, two papers published to pre-print scientific repository Arxiv posit that LK-99 could, maybe, prove to be a superconductor if only some doping were applied. Doping LK-99 is exactly what it sounds like: you take something that wasn't in the original recipe (in this case, for lead-apatite) and you put it inside the system to improve its performance. In this case, the new results, penned by Liang Si et al and Korotin et al, find reason to believe that doping LK-99 by inserting extraneous atoms (which weren't supposed to exist in the original system) might result in the claimed superconductivity. We say "might" because they haven't actually created and doped the substance. Although initial analysis from other teams found that LK-99 already had the 'Fermi' flat bands necessary for electrons to cross unimpeded and frictionlessly (as they'd need for the zero resistance claim to be true), others have theorized that it needs some help getting there: there's still work to do to even understand LK-99. Achieving the exactly-precise configuration of particles and quantum particles (quanta) is hard.

2023 August 10, Francisco Pires, “Alleged Superconductor LK-99 Might Need 'Doping' to Work”, in Tom's Hardware, archived from the original on 20 Jul 2025