It is apparently extremely difficult to fabricate LK-99 and most of the time the process being used creates similar substances but without appropriate Cu substitution in its lattice. All of the videos have been of generally quite small samples and the manufacturing difficulty is the purported reason.

The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.

I thought the original hype around LK-99 was that it was supposed to be easy to manufacture with materials most labs have on hand? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106

The materials are easily on hand. That doesn’t guarantee it was easy to manufacture.

It’s not made of out of exotic elements, mostly just lead and copper. So in theory anyone can make it, but it’s just hard to do it correctly.

- It was naive to think a simple recipe was going to play out with everyone getting what they wanted easily when they tried to follow it.

- It's still a huge deal if the manufacturing is as easy as it appears to be, even if most of the replication attempts aren't getting _quite_ the right thing. It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.

> It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.

Is it, though? I mean it's hilarious sure but if we were to draw parallels to the mother of all elements, the celestial furnaces in the sky, it seems less wild.

A pretty lucky roll of the die nonetheless.

It's extraordinary how many replication experiments are happening so quickly and how tantalizing the results are. It would be optimistic to say the original research was just going to unlock this tech for everybody at once but even if it's the clue that leads to dozens of refinements that eventually lands on a winning material then it's still a landmark event.

The ingredients and tools aren't exotic, but chemistry is still a pain in the ass.

Amusingly, some friends asked me about it shortly after the original announcement. I'm not a superconductor person, but I am a materials person.

My response was, basically, the biggest risk (after toxicity) "is that they got lucky and there are subtle things they did that aren't in the recipe which will turn out to have been critical."

I've done a lot of materials research. It's pretty likely that they got lucky on a small percentage of the samples and spent years trying to figure out what on earth was different. I am excited that 10,000 other labs will stand a very good chance of finding out.

Exactly my take. The big question for me is whether or not they haven't accidentally included some contamination that makes all the difference or whether or not the geometry of the placement of the atoms is controlled tightly enough and whether either of those is going to make a huge difference in the outcome. And then there are a hundred different process errors that could have similar effects. This could take a while to be nailed down.

I honestly don't even know what to vote for, but cooling and heating rates are unspecified, powder mesh size (and whether the powders were dried under any particular atmosphere to prevent contamination), whether they backfilled the vacuum with something in particular, maybe there was a residual magnetic field in some cases that did something, the humidity, there are so many things that are hard to control.

I fully expect the gamut of experimental designs and optimizations, including ML methods, to be applied to this one. If they got lucky once, it can be done again. If they made the measurement wrong that's another story, but nothing about this says "fraud" to me. "Wrong" sure, maybe. I fully believe they tried their hardest and that it will be possible to reproduce their result (even if it is demonstrated that their result isn't superconductivity).

I saw a betting market today about whether it will "be replicated" and I'm just like... y'all are going to be very disappointed when you realize that "replicated" is not a binary.

Shocking... https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01516

The consensus of this forum was absolutely that it's super easy to manufacture, any chemistry youtuber can do it, and that we are going to know whether it works or not within 48 hours.

I wonder if the people who steered the discussion just pretended to be experts or what happened. Where were the people who now in these threads explain the reasons why it is really difficult to bake? Or are those the same users?

The other day, about a third of top posts on hn where about this. I got the impression there was an organised campaign by the believers. The usual healthy skepticism was buried beneath the cheerleaders. Most top comments where along the lines "I never believed it. Until now".

Probably people who knew above average about the process and sourcing materials to realize you just had to throw some common stuff in a furnace but without being experts in material science. Even then if it's tricky to do its most likely because the process is not well know/refined yet