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Could Chinese team’s viral LK-99 video offer clue to superconductor holy grail for physicists?

  • Student duo at Wuhan science and technology university posts video showing replicated LK-99 superconductor crystal created by Korean team days before
  • As social media users hail the potential launch of a new industrial revolution, scepticism rules among mainstream physicists

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A superconductor must exhibit absolute zero resistance and complete diamagnetism – or the quality of being repelled by a magnet. But this is typically only achieved at extremely low temperatures (pictured). Shutterstock
Dannie Peng
Superconductivity at room temperature – a holy grail concept for physicists – has sparked a buzz across Chinese social media after a pair of university students from Wuhan claimed to have achieved the feat in a lab.

Their nearly four-minute video was posted online on Tuesday afternoon and racked up millions of views overnight. By Wednesday evening, it was the second most-watched video on Bilibili – China’s answer to YouTube.

The team from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) synthesised a tiny crystal – just micrometres in diameter – under a microscope, and proceeded to demonstrate its antimagnetic, levitative properties.

This tiny dot, known as LK-99, could hold immense potential if it is a genuine room-temperature, ambient-condition superconductor as claimed by some scientists – helping to produce technological marvels such as speedy levitating vehicles and 100 per cent efficient electrical grids.

However, there was scepticism and heated debate in the scientific community.

On the same day that the Chinese team’s video went viral, two groups of researchers from China and India published papers on preprint server arXiv, claiming successful preparation of the LK-99 material.

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