From Undark, January 5:
Materials scientist Eva Zurek unravels the hype and recent controversies surrounding superconductivity research.
High-temperature superconductivity is one of the holy grails of physics. It also seems to attract a steady stream of controversy, with a recent string of retracted papers and provocative claims that haven’t held up to scrutiny.
Superconductivity is the name physicists give to an unusual phenomenon in which a material is able to conduct electricity with no resistance. While the effect has been known for more than a century, so far superconductivity has only been found to occur at incredibly low temperatures. And in the few cases where it’s been achieved at anything approaching the balminess of a winter’s day in Antarctica, it’s required mind-bogglingly high pressure comparable to the pressure deep in the Earth’s core.
The stakes are enormous: If superconductors worked at anything close to room temperature, it could lead to everything from levitating trains and improved MRI scanners to better energy storage devices and more efficient electronics in general. Perhaps because of that potential, the field has spawned a great deal of hype, often accompanied by disappointment.
In July 2023, scientists in South Korea claimed to have found a room-temperature superconductor that they named LK-99; however, other scientists failed to replicate the team’s results. Undark has also reported on an ongoing controversy surrounding the work of University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias, three of whose papers have been retracted within the last two years — two in the journal Nature and one in Physical Review Letters. (Two of the three papers involved superconductivity. In August, the New York Times reported that Dias was under investigation by his university.)
Even so, excitement continues to surround materials known as superhydrides — hydrogen-rich materials that appear to allow for superconductivity at higher temperatures, albeit under tremendous pressure — which is why researchers like Eva Zurek, a computational materials scientist in the chemistry department at the University at Buffalo, continues to be fascinated by them.
Our interview was conducted over Zoom and email, and has been edited for length and clarity.
UD: Do you feel that it’s in part because the stakes are so high that we see what seems like a disproportionate number of disputes and controversies surrounding superconductivity?
EZ: Because the stakes are so high in superconductivity, people will want to replicate the experiments and, as a result, errors are more likely to be revealed. If the science is not high stakes, people are less likely to repeat it, and less interested in ensuring that the results are correct.
UD: Could some of the controversy be avoided if scientists were more open in terms of making their methods and data available for scrutiny?
EZ: I think there are a few reasons why there is controversy. First of all, making sure that you are reporting something that is a superconductor and not just a metal with strange properties, can in some cases be very difficult. So in the case of the hydrides, for example, it was really hard to show that they do indeed expel a magnetic field — that they exhibit what is known as the Meissner Effect — just because of the way that the experiments are performed in diamond anvil cells that have a lot of magnetic material. So it’s just experimentally difficult, in that case, to actually 100 percent prove that what you have is a superconductor.
Of course, there are other issues about reporting all data and making sure that researchers have access to it. But, there are issues about fraud, and then there are issues about not being able to prove something 100 percent correctly at that given time because of experimental limitations, which are two separate issues....
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If interested see also Retraction Watch on the blogroll at right who get the hat tip for this link.
