The Breakdown - A Primer on LK-99

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

LK-99 has captured the world's attention for its promise of room-temperature superconductivity. But what does that even mean? NLW provides an overview and primer. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribeto the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, August 4th, and today we are doing a primer on LK99. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, there are a lot of jokes going around Twitter about people pivoting from

crypto to artificial intelligence to finally now moving on to superconductors. And so, of course, I decided to completely embody that stereotype and do the primer show on LK-99. Now, in all seriousness, you know that the frame for everything on the breakdown network is big picture power shifts. And if this ends up being real, it would certainly qualify. So today's goal is to give all of us lay folks and non-experts out there a base-level understanding in what the hell is going on,

so we can try to follow along and understand how excited, or on the other hand, disappointed to be, as more news comes out. So what we are talking about is, of course, that in late July, a pair of scientific papers were published, claiming to have synthesized a superconducting material that operates at room temperature and ambient pressure. The material was named LK99. Now initially, some optimists were very excited, but by and large, the response was skeptical. This type of superconductor had been the subject of high-profile scientific fraud just a few years ago, and some of the data presented in the

paper seemed questionable. The following week, one of the authors of the paper, Young Wan Kwan, presented his team's findings at Korea University. And just to add more intrigue to the whole thing, his appearance was shrouded in controversy. There were allegations that Kwan had uploaded the paper without the consent of the other authors, unofficial from Korea University disavowed affiliation with Kwan, saying that he was no longer in contact with the university. There was even some suggestion that he had shown up unannounced to give the presentation. And already enthralled by the story, the internet tuned into the Korean language presentation which fleshed out the data and the findings. Kwan claimed to have brought a sample of the superconducting material but was unable to source equipment

to hold the demonstration. Still, despite some of the problems, the presentation did fill in enough gaps from the paper to convert some number of people into, if not outright believers, at least a little bit more optimistic. And what's more, it seemed to people like the implications were really significant. Not only in terms of what a room temperature superconductor would mean, but also in terms of what it said about the scientific process. General fabrication engineer Matt Palmer wrote, if the room temp superconductor paper is real, then it's one of the most profound indictments of the way we do science ever made. You could easily have found this with an 1890s lab, which means that we've been effing up the search process over the space of possible room temperature superconductors

in profound ways for over a century. Either our discovery process is unacceptably inefficient, or our allocation of resources to research and development is much too sparse. Now, at this point, with the idea in mind that this is a primer for people who are just coming into this discussion, let's talk about what a superconductor actually is. Obviously, it's very integral to the story. In very basic terms, a superconductor is a material that transmits electricity without resistance. This means a cable made of a superconducting material could transmit electricity over long distances without losing power or generating heat. Keep in mind, for example, the US electrical grid loses around 5% of its power during transmission, and uses

extremely high voltage to achieve this level of efficiency. To give a sense of scale, copper wire has around 168,000 times more resistance than superconducting material. Now, superconductors have a few other interesting properties that give them some unique use cases. Because electrons can move freely through superconducting material, they are perfect insulators for magnetic fields. When a magnetic field is applied to a superconductor, the electrons within it move to cancel the magnetic field out entirely. This property is known as the Meisner effect. This effect causes a superconductor to float in mid-air above a magnet. And if you've been following this story, you've probably already seen a lot of videos of hovering material.

However, the Meisner effect is also used in some advanced high-speed trains. The lack of resistance within a superconducting material also means that lossless battery design is possible. Electric current can persist indefinitely within a superconducting loop without any degradation. However, so far, superconducting batteries are so impractical that they aren't used in applications that you would typically think of for batteries. Instead, they are generally only used for things like cleaning the electricity supply for facilities with very tight tolerances like microchip fabrication plants. Now, superconductors are not a new discovery. The phenomenon was first discovered in 1911 as a property of mercury when cooled by liquid helium

to negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit within an ultra-low pressure environment. Shortly afterwards, the phenomenon was observed in tin and lead at similar temperatures. Since then, over 70 different elements and compounds have been discovered to have superconducting properties under certain conditions. The problem up until this point was that no one could figure out how to create a superconductor that would function at anywhere near room temperature. Most modern superconductor applications use a material that functions while cooled by either liquid nitrogen at around negative 300 degrees Fahrenheit or liquid helium.

Thus, this challenge to create a superconductor that could function at room temperature has been one of the holy grails of material science for decades. Indeed, this long history is why some people with more experience in the field were initially so inclined to be skeptical. On August 2nd, Professor Michael S. Fiora wrote, I am seeing a lot of newcomers lately to the room temperature superconductor rodeo. They might not be aware of the long history of these events, and I think there's some cross-cultural communications difficulties going on because of that.

He goes on. There's no reason that we know that a room temperature superconductor can't exist, but we also don't know how to make one by design. It almost certainly won't superconduct by a quote-unquote conventional mechanism, so it'll be serendipitous discovery in some unexpected strange material. But not every serendipitously discovered unexpected apparent very low resistance state in a strange material is superconductivity. You'd think superconductivity would be easy to detect.

It comes with zero electrical resistance, so if you measure resistance and it's zero, you're done. Unfortunately, there are many ways to get fooled. Too many for one thread. So generally, you'll need to see multiple pieces of evidence for superconduct. Misenor effect, AC susceptibility, temperature-dependent critical field, etc., etc., etc. Even then, nature sometimes throws good scientists a curveball and can fool on multiple counts. So there is a steady trickle of difficult-to-explain results that look a lot like superconductivity, sometimes at unexpectedly high temperatures.

The word tantalizing is often used. These are colloquially called unidentified superconducting objects. There are also some more scandalous cases where fraud was known to occur or strongly suspected. Also notable is that there's no clear end to each of these stories. In many cases, if you look into these past examples, you'll find them just as credible as the most recent example. It's just that, after a while, with no news of experimental replication in other labs, interest fizzles out. Unfortunately, many mysteries in science remain unsolved. But with that, let's talk about what this paper actually said. The paper was called the first room temperature ambient pressure

Superconductor, and while I had started to write my own summary of what it said, aided of course by GPT4, using the Arvix reading plugin, I actually think that the best simple description comes from R's Technica. Given that, I am going to quote it now at length. The more detailed of the two manuscripts describes how to make the material and measurements of its property. The material itself is a variation of a well-known chemical called lead appetite. Apatites are a class of chemical that form similar crystal structures. This particular version is primarily composed of lead and phosphate groups, all of its constituents are cheap and readily available. The version developed here, which has been termed LK99, was made by reacting a lead sulfate with a

copper phosphorus compound. The reaction requires high temperatures for over a day under a vacuum. This strips the phosphorus from the copper, oxidizes it, and allows it to displace the sulfur from its compound with the lead. Critically, though, some fraction of the lead itself ends up replaced by copper in the resulting compound. This has a significant impact on the appetite crystal structure because copper is quite a bit smaller than lead. The researchers claim the overall volume of the sample drops by about half a percentage as well, and that change is accompanied by shifts in the orientation of various atoms and bonds. That means changes in where the electrons reside within the material. That change appears to be critical to the LK99's behavior.

Superconductivity is associated with a number of very specific properties, and the researchers measure two of them, the expulsion of magnetic field lines called the Meisner effect, and the existence of a critical temperature at which conductivity changes. It's hard to explain just how strange these experiments are. Under normal circumstances, the superconducting material starts out behaving as a normal chemical and has to be cooled down to the critical point where exceptional behavior emerges. LK99 by contrast starts out superconducting and has to be heated beyond the boiling point of water to reach its critical temperature. The only somewhat strange result here comes at temperatures just below the critical temperature. At room temperature and above, the resistance of LK99 remains at

zero, as far as the testing equipment is able to measure. But it starts to rise ever so slightly once temperatures reach 60 degrees Celsius and displays a smooth upward slope until the sample hits 90 degrees Celsius, at which point it stays flat until the critical temperature is reached. The researchers did not attempt to explain this. So even that, which is well written and simplified for a generalist audience, is still obviously extremely technically dense. But in many ways this story isn't as much about the science, because obviously what do I have to say about that, and instead is about what has happened surrounding this research. Following Kwan's presentation, the scientific community was armed with a plausible set of data,

a reasonable explanation of the novel superconducting mechanism, and an achievable process to synthesize the material. That meant, of course, that the race to replicate the result was on. At least 12 attempts to synthesize LK99 are currently underway at universities and national laboratories around the world. At the time of recording, two Chinese laboratories have claimed to have succeeded in replicating LK99. You might have seen the video of a tiny flake of the material floating above a magnet which went viral on Chinese social media on Wednesday. Now this floating phenomenon, which is a demonstration of the Meisner effect, is the easiest way to prove that the replication

attempt has yielded a superconductor without extensive material testing results. However, there is still significant skepticism concerning the validity of the proof presented by those Chinese institutions. At the moment, the original samples of LK99 produced by the Korean team, have not been given to other labs for independent verification, although this has been promised to happen soon. Now, part of the confusion around why replication is taking such a long time is that the method of creating LK99 is deceptively simple while also being fiendishly difficult. It has now been two weeks since the preprint paper was released, and a week since

Kwan's presentation of the results. LK99 is not created using a particularly complex process or using any exotic materials. Two relatively common lead compounds are combined in a furnace and then a copper compound is added under a vacuum. The limiting factor is really just time. From precursor chemicals to the final result, the process takes around three days. Indeed, demonstrating how simple the process is to carry out with common lab equipment, one Russian chemist live tweeted her chaotic attempt to cook up LK99 in her garage, including a few homegrown improvements to the recipe. At the end of that process, she presented a picture of a tiny fleck of floating material, but no one is quite sure how genuine this particular

threat or attempt was. Now, another problem with the problem with the problem. process is that it creates extremely low yields. The claimed successful replications out of China have produced samples no larger than a grain of sand. The chemistry involves a good deal of luck to be successful. During the process, copper atoms replace lead atoms within the material structure, which happens entirely by chance. To create a viable sample, this luck has to occur within a continuous chain of atoms to create a superconductor large enough to test. Adding to the problems, LK99 is only a superconductor along one dimension within its three-dimensional structure. This means that some samples may not levitate, making them much harder to detect. Now, the latest attempt

that people are excited about comes from Varda space industries in the U.S. Varda is a group of engineers working on space technology, but they got really excited about this, realized that they had everything they needed to theoretically replicate the experiment in the lab, and last night on Thursday, August 3rd, shared a video suggesting that they had actually been successful in replicating the apparent diamagnetic properties of LK99. You might have seen this video going around. It has a tiny little worm-like thing moving in what appears to be a glass beaker, and text on top that says Meisner effect or bust. In a conversation with Jason Calcanus just before I started recording, Andrew McAllep from Varda said, this was a replication attempt, taking their procedure and trying

to replicate that. The classic scientific process, not trying to improve it, just trying to show that it's a real physical effect. McAllip said that they took their steps, ran through all the processes, a first reaction, a second reaction, and a third reaction, and just got through the the third reaction late last night. McAllep said that they were surprised that they were the first to acknowledge in the United States that they had made it all the way through, and said, quote, we've got some material that matches some of the properties that have been reported online. We have some weird and interesting first results. Now, of course, even on top of the fact that we haven't fully replicated LK99 yet, there are still a number of challenges, even if we do.

First of all, we don't really know the other properties of LK99. We don't know whether it can be manufactured into wire, which is not a given for this sort of ceramic compound. We don't know how to increase the yield. Remember, at this stage, the synthesizing process seems absurdly difficult to get a large amount of material from. And another problem is, of course, the political ramifications. The world has something of a checkered history with how to deal with breakthrough technologies. Remember, nuclear technology is still a state secret after almost a century, to say nothing of things like cloning tech or anything else that has been determined to be borderline forbidden. The flip side is that if LK99 proves that room temperature semiconductors can be manufactured,

the implications are wild. Take, for example, the implications for fusion. Fusion power generation has been a pipe dream for decades. Multiple functional experimental units have now been built and demonstrated that a contained fusion reaction is possible. The issue has been that containment of the reaction within a magnetic field requires a massive amount of energy to sustain. To date, no fusion experiments have managed to produce more energy than they consume

during operation, which obviously makes them useless as the core of a power plant. However, some designs use superconducting material as part of their containment structure. So the breakthroughs that follow LK99 could have significant implications for how fusion power generation progresses. There are also the implications for quantum computing. Presently, some approaches to quantum computing use superconducting materials within their chips. And while the chip is small, the cooling system used to maintain its superconductive state is gigantic and extremely energy intensive.

If a material like LK99 can be used to make quantum chips, that could open the door to more realistically achievable quantum computing. In other words, by eliminating the barrier of requiring gigantic cooling systems, the research could be much more accessible leading to faster advancement and maybe even consumer-grade devices one day. There are also the implications for current superconductor applications. Current MRI machines, for example, use large superconductors cooled by liquid nitrogen to generate the massive magnetic fields required for the imaging process. These superconductors are extremely costly to build and operate. If LK99 opens the door to lower-cost superconductors that don't require large cooling systems, it's easy to imagine small MRI machines in every doctor's

office to be used for more routine diagnosis. Another current application? The cost to construct and operate superconductor-based high-speed rail could collapse. The current state-of-the-art trains in Japan use superconductors to levitate the train above the rail. But these systems require a huge amount of electricity to maintain ultra-low temperatures. And then there's just the simple but transformative idea that electricity might be one day easily transportable from coast to coast without concerns of energy loss along the way. And of course, we haven't even gotten into the 80s dream of hoverboards and things like that. As Matt Parmler again says, if LK99 is real, we're going to get to redo all electronics and it's going to be awesome. And one more dimension of the story as we wrap up here

is how this is playing out. It's highly notable that the first replication in the United States it appears, is a bunch of guys at a startup who just read about all this stuff online. Ada Pai wrote, We're moving back into the frontier for science again. Internet-scale human hive mind applied to problems in global attention focus. I'm John Mossad, the CEO at Replit said, whatever happens, this feels like the first truly internet-native science moment. Yolode paper, shipping revisions, live-stream replications, betting markets, internet randos with deep insights, etc. So even if, then, LK99 ultimately disappoints in terms of its great promise. Everything that has surrounded it does potentially suggest what science might look like in the future,

a world in which peer review is not just some tightly controlled process, but massive, global, and in real time. Pretty fascinating to think about. Anyways, for now, that is going to do it for today's breakdown. Hopefully this was a useful primer on LK99. I will certainly keep you posted if and as developments warrant. it. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.