South Korean varsity turns up probe heat on professor's superconductor at room temperature 'hoax'

Just a few weeks back, the whole world was caught off guard by some pretty bold claims about a room-temperature superconductor. This discovery could potentially shake up modern physics in a big way. Now the lead author of the viral paper has been accused of academic fraud.

Although not exactly false, those claims turned out to be inaccurate. In fact, it was a team of Indian researchers who first demonstrated that the material in question, LK-99 wasn’t showing the properties of a superconductor at room temperature as it should have.

To know more why this discovery made the kind of waves it did, watch this video:

Now, a South Korean university is diving into this mess. Korea University, is looking into a complaint made against the professor who published the paper

Professor accused of academic fraud
According to Bloomberg, Professor Young-Wan Kwon, supposedly published the paper about this superconductor breakthrough without getting the green light from his co-authors.

Kwon went ahead and shared a sneak peek of his findings, calling the superconductor “LK-99,” on Cornell University’s arXiv server in late July. Now, his colleagues from Korea University are on the case, saying it’s serious enough to warrant a six-month-long investigation.

Kwon and his team from Korea University’s Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology are staying quiet and have refused to speak on the matter with the press.

Kwon uploaded the paper on July 22 along with his co-authors Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim. A few hours later, Lee and Kim put up another paper on arXiv, but this time there were four additional co-authors, and Kwon’s name was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, this was their way of hitting back after Kwon’s original manuscript went up.

About LK-99
The alleged room-temperature superconductor that the South Korean team developed is a special mix of copper, lead, phosphorous, and oxygen.

These researchers claimed that this compound could act like a superconductor up to scorching temperatures of 260 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s around 127 degrees Celsius). But other scientists tried to replicate their results and got inconsistent results that refuted their claim.

Despite that, this whole drama got the science community’s gears turning.

Why a superconductor is such a big deal
A room-temperature superconductor could have some serious implications on how we get power. Superconductors let electricity flow without any resistance. Conventionally made superconductors need to go to very low temperatures and extreme pressure to be able to perform that way.

That’s why they’re mostly found in laboratory conditions. If we could pull this off at room temperature! It could change everything, from how we power our cities to how we get around.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have gotten this hyped up about superconductors. Earlier this year, in March, a team at the University of Rochester claimed they cracked the code on a room-temperature superconductor too.

They put it out there in a paper published in Nature. However, the New York Times reported that their paper is getting yanked from the journal. And one of the authors is in some hot water too, facing allegations of not-so-great research conduct.