The Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics have announced that they will test claims of the first room-temperature superconductors.
In its statement the society said that it has retrieved samples from Quantum Energy Research Centre to verify the claims made in the Centre’s research published on 22 July 2023.
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The original research was posted on a site for pre-publication papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed. Despite this, the paper has already made headlines globally and incited one Twitch streamer and engineer, Andrew McCalip, to attempt to review the paper live.
The Society stated that their aim is to “judge the current situation from a scientific point of view, and clearly judge the results” according to this translation.
Despite the claim still being in the process of verification, the alleged room-temperature superconductor named LK-99 has already affected investment.
As well as testing samples from the Quantum Energy Research Centre, researchers are also working on recreating LK-99 at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea University and Seoul National University.
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By GlobalDataThe impact of room-temperature superconductors
Current superconductors require largescale amounts of cooling or pressure, which makes it harder to use them in widescale technology.
Speaking on how this claim may affect the tech industry, GlobalData senior analyst Isabel Al-Dhahir stated the discovery would revolutionise computing, healthcare, nuclear fusion and more.
Superconductors are presently used in MRI machines and to enable faster power transfer between computer chips.
“The lossless transmission of power brings several advantages to the world,” Al-Dhahir responds, “including simpler electricity grids, cheaper energy bills and smaller electrical appliances.”
For Al-Dhahir, one particularly interesting possibility is the increased efficacy of long-distance power transmission generated by renewable energy sources. An accomplishment she believes would allow countries to benefit from renewable energy even without their own clean energy infrastructure.
However, Quantum Energy Research Centre’s claim to room-temperature superconductors is not the first.
Equivalent claims were also made in a paper published back in March 2023, which aroused suspicion after the paper’s author had published a similar paper in 2020 which was subsequently removed by the publisher.
