South Korean researchers say they've discovered, an alleged room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, as reported in IFLScience. As the name implies, superconductors conduct electricity with negligible resistance, unlike metal wires. Traditional superconductors that require extremely low temperatures, but LK-99 is claimed to function under everyday conditions. Its critical temperature, below which it exhibits superconductivity, is 261 °F.
If verified, this discovery could have far-reaching implications for technological applications, including magnets, motors, cables, levitation trains, power cables, qubits for quantum computers, and THz antennas. "We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind," say the researchers, whose paper was uploaded to arXiv.
However, healthy skepticism is warranted, as the effect hasn't been independently verified, and all previous claims of room-temperature superconductors have been debunked. In fact, just yesterday, Physical Review Letters retracted a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor.
