
A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments (science.org) 102
And even though I'm usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team (PDF) at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other (PDF) is from Sinead Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor..." [...]
I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. Not that there's anything wrong with new physics (!), but it sets a much, much higher bar if you have to invoke something in that range. I await more replication data, and with more than just social media videos backing them up. This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.