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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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science
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There is no room for a mistake or massaging data here. The authors have photos and video of magnetic levitation. It is either outright fraud, or true. You are claiming without evidence that these people intentionally faked the paper and it is entirely made up (which could well be true, but is a much stronger claim than shoddy statistical analysis, and much easier to prove).
As to prior work. All three authors have previous publications on perovskites. If the trick for room temperature superconductivity turns out to be putting a low temperature superconducting material in a crystal lattice where it doesn't have enough room (which is a concept consistent with existing literature), then it seems reasonable that a perovskite researcher would discover it first as there is not really any special knowledge of superconductivity beyond the basics required (ie. The what is exceedingly simple if it turns out it works, the how is hard and is not the domain of a superconductivity expert).
Extraordinary claims and all that, but none of your criticisms are valid.
Can you link me to their prior work? I could not find it. I did check Q-centre and it is a commercial page selling this material as a product. This is a scam, not the biggest breakthrough of the century (until/unless we get working fusion power plants).
Just click through the links on the names. A decent number of them were actually published in reputable journals (the ones with doi links). On second glance there's a decent amount of superconductor stuff there too.
If it is fraud, it's very deliberate fraud (the website is sketchy as hell so could easily be).
https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
There is no way that is diamagnetic or ferromagnetic levitation unless the "magnet" under it is actually several magnets in different orientations or there are other magnets deliberately hidden out of frame. The sketchy website and lack of any public facing claims actually bodes well in my book. Fraudsters generally don't limit the video to an obscure link.
Given how simple the reproduction is, we should see a reproduction or some debunking within a few weeks.
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.