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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Just by clicking on Arxiv I see lists of people with similar names, but if you look specifically for them they are only on this paper and the sibling paper with the levitation: Sukbae, Kim and Young-Wan. Kim is also on the other paper without the dash in his name.

    Searching in scholar, researchgate, web of science, I cannot find anything.

    I have checked out the levitation video, but I see no levitation there, just a magnetized thing with low mass. The typical Meissner effect levitation is done by cooling from above Tc, while keeping your superconductor separated from the magnet a small distance. The flux lines get pinned once you cool down below Tc and you can remove your spacer leaving your SC levitating. This is not that.

    In any case, I fully agree with your last sentence: The fabrication procedure is simple enough that anyone that wants to replicate it, can do so. I really would love to be proven wrong, ambient SC would be an absolute civilization changer, but I don’t think this is anything of the sort.



  • Just by looking at the authors, this is not real:

    Of the three, the first author (and corresponding author) and second author claim Q-centre as affiliation. If you check the webpage, it is not a research lab but just a commercial company selling this as a product. The third author claims KU-KIST as affiliation, but the only one I can find in google scholar has no background on superconductivity at all, and actually I can’t even find them as a current faculty member of KU-KIST.

    If you look at the other paper they have in arxiv about the same, list of authors from the same Q-Centre, plus a last author from Hanyang university, but researchgate shows him as last publishing in 2006, so I assume long time retired by now. Not in the field of superconductors either.

    I am looking for other work from any of the authors, and I can find none. Science is an incremental process, with some breakthroughs, sure, but incremental. Cancer won’t be cured in a day, and room temperature ambient pressure superconductors won’t just happen out of nowhere. Even room temperature superconductors at very high pressures aren’t really a thing, as the recent retractions of Ranga Dias’ papers shows.

    As an aside, here is an interesting talk about the work that went into showing that the data was manipulated in those high-pressure room-temperature superconductor papers - as much as papers with manipulated data are a terrible thing for science, the fact that people will go to these lengths to prove them wrong is very reassuring. A paper that is wrong only misleads for a while, actual science pushes through and buries it eventually.