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Failed replication of claimed superconductor reported on arxiv (arxiv.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

"Essentially, they’re saying you can bake up a sample of this stuff, pop it out of the oven, and just sitting there on your lab bench it will conduct electricity without any resistance."

From what I have heard, it's not supposed to be that expensive or even difficult to make. They should have sent actual samples of the material to a dozen different universities from a batch they share their own data measurements about. Save everyone a lot of time about doubts that it's manufactured correctly.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From that article:

“The general public seems oddly pumped about how ‘easy’ the 4-day, multistep, small batch, solid state synthesis is,”

The process is a 3-stage heating-holding-cooling process which they haven't published the precise temperature profile for. The papers also claim only 4 samples were ever made in total, 2 of them got (destructively) analyzed by gas spectroscopy and crystallography, while of the other 2, one got further temperature annealed, and both got electrically characterized.

Chances are, they themselves don't know exactly how they got what they got, and may or may not be capable of producing more samples.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I imagine they only have a few grams of the stuff. And they're not highly motivated to be debunked immediately

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but if it were real, they were claiming it could be manufactured easily, so making some samples to send out to research labs would not be too difficult

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Right. And they haven't. Now what may we deduce about their confidence in these results?