A few days after the papers appeared on the arXiv – and mere hours after their sensational claims began circulating on social media, crashing Q-Centre’s website in the process – experts in the field urged caution. Richard Greene, a physicist at the University of Maryland, US who has worked on superconducting materials since the 1970s, observed that while the Meissner-effect video “looks impressive” at first glance, superconductivity is not the only phenomenon that can cause objects to levitate. “If you look carefully you see that sample 2 (which was levitated) has a large diamagnetic magnetization in the normal state,” he said. “So it could be levitated just because it’s a diamagnetic material.”
Another physicist, Douglas Natelson of Rice University, US, highlighted apparent inconsistencies in the two papers’ data on magnetic susceptibility, Χ. When Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim and colleagues placed their sample of LK-99 in a magnetic field, the six-authored paper states that the change in the material’s mass susceptibility (that is, Χ divided by density) amounted to 2.5 x 10-4 electromagnetic units per gram. “Assuming a density of about 7 grams per cubic centimetre, that gives Χ = –0.022, about 36 times that of graphite,” Natelson wrote in a Twitter/X thread dedicated to the findings. “That would be exciting, if it’s accurate.”
However, Natelson went on to note that “what appears to be the same data” also appears in Figure 4 of the three-authored paper, but with a completely different scale on the graph’s y-axis. This second set of numbers is, he said, “unphysical”, adding that the “pretty sloppy” discrepancy “does not encourage confidence in the results”.
要睇物呢篇
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037