LK99: Hope or Hyperbole

The Story of LK99

Something that could very well affect every living thing on this planet was announced a couple of weeks ago, actually it was first announced in 1999, but it was just recently presented in several scientific pre-prints and it brought with it the kind of excitement and skepticism that’s shaking the foundations of many in the scientific community to the core.

On the surface, and to many who, for example, just turn on the lights and expect the electricity to be there, it really didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but if loss-free electrical transmission, vastly improved MRIs, greatly enhanced quantum computers, high speed levitating trains, and virtually limitless green energy storage, to name just a few things that come immediately to mind are of any interest, then the potential discovery of room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors are revolutionary and guaranteed to immediately win the people who discovered it a Nobel Prize and unimaginable wealth.

But, like a lot of things that seem too good to be true, LK99, a polycrystalline made of a specialized compound of 4 simple ingredients; copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen is having a tough time measuring up to what its inventors claim as labs all around the world have yet to be able to duplicate its creation and proclaimed properties.

As we know though, history is fraught with discoveries that have been accidental, misinterpreted, seemingly unable to be replicated, and sometimes even later been found to be good for things for which they weren’t even first considered. So, I’m not willing to discount the claims first made in 1999 by Sukbae Lee and Ji-hoon Kim and again brought forward a couple of weeks ago just yet, because despite repeated worldwide attempts to replicate the findings, there’s something about the assertions of these guys that make me think, and I also really hope, might prove to be true.

The Pathway to Superconductivity

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was something of a wunderkind. In 1870, he entered the University of Groningen when he was 17 years old and by 18 had won the gold medal at the Natural Sciences Facility at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

He first focused on refrigeration techniques and spent many years perfecting cryogenic experiments and researching fluids and metals at low temperatures. In 1906 he designed and built his version of a hydrogen liquefaction machine and in 1908 he succeeded in liquefying helium. Through his process, he was able to bring its temperature down to -271.3°C, which was the nearest anyone had come to reaching absolute zero. It was for this that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913.

Along the way though, he was transfixed by the liquid metal, mercury. In 1911, as he lowered the temperature of mercury through his cryogenic process, he found that when it was cooled to liquid helium temperatures that it held zero electrical resistance. In other words, he could run electrical current through it and there was no loss of electricity.

He called this phenomenon “superconductivity” and he also discovered that this “superconductivity” effect was also able to be duplicated in many other metals such as lead and tin.

112 years later, his discoveries still represent the very foundations of superconductivity as we know it and many of the metals he discovered that had the properties are still widely used. He probably also should have won a Nobel Prize for this discovery, but at the time the value of the discovery was limited.

When we think of the prestigious Nobel Prize today, we often don’t remember how the globally recognized award came to be started, but it’s origins in many ways reflect what may be happening with LK99.

The Serendipity of Science: Accidental Breakthroughs Shaping Our World

You see, in 1846, and as something of a laboratory curiosity, Asciano Sobrero, an Italian chemist added glycerol to a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids and invented a blasting oil that he called pyroglycerin. Right from the start this was a highly volatile liquid and even in minute quantities it could produce impressive explosions.

Because of the risks involved in its manufacture, or even what could happen when slightly varying the recipe, or even if it was shaken or accidentally dropped, and the usually unintentionally explosive results that came with it, Sobrero didn’t take it out of the lab for more than a year. In fact, he was even hesitant to publish any papers about his work because of the substance’s extremely dangerous properties.

However, when he tasted it – as was the norm for many chemists in the late 1800’s when they invented new compounds, and despite the inherent dangers in doing so – he found that it gave him an extreme headache. The headache suggested that the liquid was a vasodilator and might have medical implications. He made note of the finding and in the 1870’s, English physician and pharmacist William Murrell used it in small doses to help alleviate angina and hypertension, and it’s still used to this day in a diluted spray form or sublingually by people with chest pain and coronary issues.

Finding a stable and dependable means of detonating the highly volatile concoction was tricky though, and in one attempt Sobrero had his face and hands badly burned during an experiment with the liquid that would soon be known as nitroglycerin. After many such accidents, the manufacturing and distribution of the liquid was banned in many jurisdictions all around Europe.

In fact, even before the refinement that would bring the invention to the world on a massive scale, Sobrero would say,

“When I think of all the victims killed during nitroglycerine explosions, and the terrible havoc that has been wreaked, which in all probability will continue to occur in the future, I am almost ashamed to admit to be its discoverer.”

However, one person’s danger is another person’s acceptable risk and money-making machine, and recognizing the many potential uses for nitroglycerin, an associate and fellow student of Théophile Pelouze under whom Sobrero also studied, Swedish chemist and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel, worked to invent a way to transform the liquid into a practical explosive that could be safely handled, despite many arguments with Sobrero and his persistent objections.

In 1867, Nobel accidentally invented dynamite when he created and combined a formulation of nitroglycerin and sorbents like diatomaceous earth and he found that the materials would absorb and congeal the explosive liquid, maintain most of its explosive capabilities, and allow it to be handled relatively safely.

Nobel went on to invent many forms of explosives, many using nitroglycerin as a base, and amongst the 350 patents that he had and that covered a wide variety of disciplines, he also invented the one invention that truly made dynamite effective, the blasting cap.

Globally, his companies primarily focused on the manufacturing of explosives and ammunitions, and he amassed tremendous wealth, even as he spent decades fighting off competing companies that continually violated his patents. But his inventions and the industries that used his explosives and the countries and their armies that used his military inventions kept his factories at capacity.

Although he was generous with his humanitarian and scientific philanthropies throughout his life, and would live mostly in seclusion because he was far more interested in discoveries and inventions than most people or anything else, in his later years there’s reason to believe that when his brother Ludvig – an oil baron and the wealthiest of the Nobel family – died in Cannes in 1888 and a French newspaper mistakenly ran the headline that, “The Merchant of Death is Dead”, that Alfred decided that as they thought that they were writing about him that this wasn’t the way that he wanted to be remembered for the rest of eternity.

In 1896, he died from a cerebral hemorrhage and angina pectoris, leaving more than 90 factories worldwide. Unexpectedly though, when his will, that was written in Paris in 1895 and just a few months before his death, was opened, his family and friends and most of the world were shocked to discover that it held a surprise. He had left the bulk of his fortune in a trust in Stockholm to establish what would go on to become the world’s most prestigious prizes given to people for intellectual services rendered to humanity – the Nobel Prize.

One of the Nobel Prizes in Science was awarded in 1945 to Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Howard Walter Florey for, “the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.”

The ancient Egyptians had the practice of applying a plaster of moldy bread to infected wounds to help speed healing, but it wasn’t until 1928 that penicillin, the first true antibiotic, was discovered by Fleming, who was then a professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London.

I mention this because, like LK99 – whose inventors attribute its original discovery to a fluke accident in the lab – Fleming also came across the discovery of penicillin by chance after he had started a series of petri dish investigations in his lab to examine colonies of Staphylococcus – a bacteria that cause boils, sore throats, and abscesses – and tossed them to the side to be washed before he went on holidays in 1928.

When he returned two weeks later on September 3rd, he found that the petri dishes had not been cleaned and that when he started to sort through them, he noticed something unusual on one of them. It was dotted with colonies of Staphylococcus, except for one area where a blob of mold was growing.

He identified the zone immediately around the mold as a rare strain of Penicillium notatum and Fleming noted that it was as if the mold had secreted something that inhibited the bacteria from growing.

Fleming discovered that this “mold juice” was able to kill a wide range of harmful bacteria, such as streptococcus, meningococcus, and the diphtheria bacillus, so he instructed his assistants, Stuart Craddock and Frederick Ridley, to undertake the difficult task of isolating the pure penicillin from the juice.

He knew he had something, but the difficult process of growing enough of the mold juice and collecting it made dealing with the discovery very challenging, not to mention that it was unstable and hard to purify.

For this reason, it wasn’t until 1939, when Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their colleagues at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University managed to turn penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a life-saving drug.

On February 12, 1941, Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman became the first recipient of the Oxford penicillin. He’d developed huge abscesses on the side of his face after contracting a life-threatening infection that also affected his eyes and lungs. Penicillin was injected and within days he’d made a remarkable recovery, then supplies of the drug ran out and he died a few days later.

Although the drug fell short of its desired result with its first patient, various pharmaceutical companies such as Glaxo got involved and began producing vast quantities of it, and with the onset of WWII penicillin proved itself invaluable on the battlefield and beyond.

Over the course of history there have been numerous inventions that many of us use every day that were the result of accidental discoveries such as plastic, the microwave oven, the x-ray machine, the implantable pacemaker, vulcanized rubber, matches, and Coca-Cola.

Even Viagra, first developed by Pfizer to help angina patients in 1989, proven to be ineffective for its original purpose but was soon discovered to have an unintended side effect that made the original study group hesitant to give it up, even if it didn’t necessarily help their heart conditions. And now, despite being a highly prescribed medication for erectile disfunction, other uses for it such as the potential ability to offset dementia are being explored.

The Pursuit of LK99

So, in 1994, when the founder of the Chemistry Department at Korea University, Professor Choi Dong-sik proposed a ground-breaking theory called ISB – Inter Atomic Superconducting Band, interatomic superconducting band theory – he proposed that superconductivity could be achieved through an inorganic one-dimensional polymer chain.

However, this was quite different from the mainstream BCS superconductivity theory and as a result didn’t attract much attention, even though some early abnormal magnetic signals did suggest that something might be happening.

In 1996, the professor convinced a student by the name of Ji-Hoon Kim to give up on his battery research and instead join his superconductivity team studying chemical synthesis.

Three years passed pretty fruitlessly until, in 1999, just as Ji-Hoon Kim was about to give up, he noticed an anomaly on a sample of lead phosphor grey rock – there was a faint fluctuation on the experimental data chart, that seemed to be induced by superconductivity.

He excitedly repeated the experiment and found that this phenomenon could be reproduced in two out of a few dozen of his samples. Unfortunately, this superconductivity-like data was ghost-like, too vague, and too subtle to be convincing. After several attempts, Ji-Hoon Kim struggled to amplify this signal and finally became discouraged, quit the superconductor lab, and returned to his original line of research in battery technologies where 4 years later he received his PHD.

For Professor Choi Dong-sik, coming so close to discovering a room temperature superconductor with Ji-Hoon Kim and then losing him was like losing a leg, and he now found that he had to place all of his hopes on Sukbae Lee, another student who had yet to graduate but who was doing some work with Ji-Hoon Kim and was willing to take up the semiconductor research.

Luckily for the professor, Sukbae Lee was talented, solid, patient, and meticulous. He and Choi Dong-sik continued to revise the ISB theory and constantly narrowed the search range for superconductor formulas. However, no matter how hard they tried, they weren’t as adept as Kim Ji-hoon, and after 9 years, based on Kim Ji-hoon’s research, Sukbae Lee completed his synthesis paper on superconductors and earned his PhD in 2008, even though he never came close to replicating Ji-hoon Kim’s findings.

After nine years of research, Sukbae Lee had had enough and switched to teaching computer science at a private university.

For Professor Choi Dong-sik, his research into one-dimensional superconductivity theory research fell by the wayside as his two research assistants were now living different lives with Ji-Hoon Kim working in a battery company and Sukbae Lee teaching.

For both of these researchers, even as they worked in different fields, they still couldn’t shake the results that they’d seen in 1999, even if they were phantom-like and seemingly impossible to replicate or build upon.

In 2008, they formed a small company that they called the Quantum Energy Research Centre – Q-Center for short – and they casually continued to conduct a few experiments and did a little consulting on the side. In truth, superconductivity was more of a hobby and they increasingly came to regard the quirk that they’d seen in 1999 as a ghost in the machine.

Then, in 2017, their mentor Choi Dong-sik took deathly ill and asked them to meet with him and begged them to keep looking for what had happened in 1999 but cautioned them not to publish anything about it before it was perfectly realized.

The professor died in May but the two agreed to carry on his research and built a lab dedicated to it.

The immediate problem was that the machinery that they’d need, like an Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) spectrometer to detect the characteristics of unpaired electrons in substances, and a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) to measure minute changes in magnetic flux, were expensive and even being able to devote the time needed to conduct full time research was going to be expensive and well beyond their means.

They submitted various applications to South Korea’s National Science Foundation as well as other places for funding, but as they hadn’t published anything or even worked in the field for over a decade, they were consistently denied assistance.

However, Sukbae Lee did have a contact that he thought might be able to help.

Kwon Young-wan was a tenured professor at Korea University. He had a solid reputation, some impressive achievements, and it just so happened he had experience with ESR and SQUID equipment. Sukbae Lee asked Kwon Young-wan to join them at Q-Center, and although he considered them to be amateurs without a whole lot of hope, it was a small commitment for him to attach his name and put in a little effort to help them secure funding and equipment.

In 2018, with the professor’s help, Q-Center was able to raise funding and get the needed machines and Ji-Hoon Kim was able to come on board full time and soon the three were being touted as the new semiconductor dream team in Korea.

But almost from the get-go, Ji-Hoon Kim and Kwon Young-wan had some serious issues getting along. As an academic, Kwon Young-wan didn’t want to simply conduct experimental research and wanted to establish essential new theories behind superconductivity, but Kim wanted to follow the paths presented from the data and signals found, especially from the ESR, and was more interested in the facts and a potential compound discovery than the potential theories.

And just like some of the elements in Sobrero’s nitroglycerin discoveries, including his own relationship with Nobel, the volatility between Ji-Hoon Kim and Kwon Young-wan did not mix well.

However, Sukbae Lee realized that over the preceding 20 years that the only one to even come close to achieving superconductivity was Kim Ji-hoon, and he soon found himself spending a large portion of his time acting as a mediator between the two.

This complexity of the relationship, and the fact that few outside the trio knew of it, is another one of the reasons why LK99 appeared so disjointed when two groups of papers about it were recently presented.

None the less, and despite the accidental nature of its first discovery in 1999, in early 2018, Ji-Hoon Kim relatively quickly was able to reproduce the trace superconducting reactions that he’d previously discovered. This time however, he was determined not to let recipe slip away again and then he kept refining the experiment, and continually seeking to amplify the fleeting signal.

But over and over again, the signal was just too weak. He tried hundreds of tweaks, but the data was sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes near and almost fully tangible, and then sometimes useless and seemingly just drifting further away. 

For anyone who’s ever spent time in the kitchen, when you’re making a specific dish, the recipe may require salt to go along with everything else, but how much salt? It might call for a pinch, but what exactly is a pinch and how might that size change from one set of fingers to the next? Just like a complicated recipe that you might try to duplicate from your grandmother’s recipe cards, more often than not it never tastes like what she made because she either knew a precise combination for ingredients, or just exactly how to stir them, or maybe she even occasionally varied the temperatures in the oven, or else she included something as mysterious as “love” or maybe even saliva from a tasting spoon that you simply weren’t putting in. My point is that even if you have the exact recipe, there are a billion variables that can come into play. And this seemed to be the case for LK99.

As a brief aside, I watched my mother once cook a ham in the oven when I was a child. Before she put it into the pan to go into the oven, she cut the ends off and then placed these cut ends on top of the remaining ham. I was puzzled by why she did this and I asked her. She replied that she didn’t know why she did it, but it was something that her mother had done. So, I asked my Babcia, my Polish Grandmother and asked her the same question. She said the same thing, that she didn’t know why but it was something that her mother had always done. Well, the female side of my family has some strong genes at work and they come from relatively hardy stock, so my Great Grandmother was still alive and I asked her why she cut the ends off of the ham before she cooked it. At over ninety years old, and still as mentally sharp as a teenager, despite a failing body, she looked at me like I was an idiot and said that she did it because the pan that she used was too small.

Sometimes it’s the simplest unasked truths that can shape traditions that last for generations…

Inspired rather than deterred by his progress, Ji-Hoon Kim invented new ways to filter his searches, but the combinations, easily changed by even diluting micro doses of particles remained as elusive as a needle in a haystack in a field of a hundred thousand haystacks. But still he persisted.

Superconductivity or Not?!

Then came Covid and 2020 and labs all across the planet were locked down and humanity appeared to teeter on the precipice of collapse with supply chains and rampant accusations inciting global animosities.

But amazingly, in the heart of all of this angst, one morning Ji-Hoon Kim saw a huge peak on the data graph. He was awestruck! This was the first time that his cursed ghost in the machine was replicated and accurately recorded.

True to the scientific method, he tried to replicate the results, but strangely, using the same materials and the same environment, he couldn’t duplicate the findings. Time and time again he tried, but still he couldn’t replicate it. He was slowly losing his mind. How could this be?

Remarkably though, Ji-Hoon Kim was, if nothing else, meticulous, both in written record keeping as well as in his propensity to video record his experimental efforts. He checked the videos and after careful examination he discovered an abnormality. When he created the substance that was registering superconductivity, he found that there was a crack in the quartz tube that had been used when he had accidentally bumped his elbow into a table when he was moving it and a slight crack had formed in the tube.

A light bulb went off!

Ji-Hoon Kim realized that at a just the right moment in the crystallization process of galena, that oxygen needed to be introduced to alter the crystal structure being formed!

Three months later, Q-Centre, and after over a thousand experiments, finally caught the “ghost” that had plagued the team for more than 20 years and had now successfully sealed it in a crystal.

The superconducting material was now able to be held in the hand and it could semi-float in a magnetic field. Sukbae Lee was overjoyed and they christened the new property LK99 after the first initial in both of their names as well as a tribute of the year it was first discovered.

Kwon Young-wan was stunned by the composition of LK-99’s chemical structure and found it hard to believe that Choi Dong-sik’s one-dimensional superconductivity theory could explain the experimental results. He did however realize that he was a step ahead of other scientists in the field and that if he could explain the underlying principles at play before anyone else, that he’d be able to share in what would assuredly be a Nobel Prize.

This led to direct conflict with other members of the team. At this point, the results urgently needed to be published, but the team was divided. And then a new problem surfaced, Q-Centre didn’t have enough funds or the equipment to conduct more comprehensive and fully conclusive measurements. The critical temperature needed for this superconducting material to be created from the normal materials it used is very high and was beyond the range of their regular laboratory equipment.

Finally, in 2020, the team overcame their difficulties and submitted a paper to the journal, Nature, hoping to win the approval of the editors. But the paper was quickly rejected as the timing of their submission was not especially good, as Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester had just been exposed for cheating on his submission for room-temperature superconductivity.

However, Kwon Young-wan believed that the real reason for the rejection was that Choi Dong-sik’s one-dimensional superconductivity theory that was included in their submission had not yet been fully completed.

They needed a further partner to bring LK99 forward and so they contacted a professor at William & Mary College in the United States who had done considerable work on semiconductors. The team at William and Mary were highly skeptical but invited them to the US to demonstrate LK99 in front of them at their labs. However, the blockades set up as a result of Covid made travel virtually impossible.

Unable to get to test their discovery for worldwide validation, the Q-Centre team started applying for patents and writing more and more papers. The thing was though, the team at Q-Centre didn’t have a perfect theory as to why LK99 worked and they were keeping the entirety of their process closely guarded. Besides, each step needed to be exacting and precise, and just like grandma’s recipes, even a slight deviation or missing the magical oxygenation step meant that labs around the world couldn’t replicate the results.

The thing was, at this time there was only one person on the planet that could occasionally but with increasing regularity make the near magical substance by adding the extra step of quickly breaking the quartz tube at just the right moment, and that was Kim Ji-hoon.

Now, as LK99 has gained widespread exposure, with the guidance of Kim Ji-hoon, Kim Hyun-jo claims that he’s been able to independently reproduce LK-99 in the United States. The yield of the material is very low, with only about one in 10 attempts being successful, and still mostly achieved through luck of good timing, and still no real good explanation of why it works.

However, the addition of Kim Hyun-jo also changed the team’s structure and, as the Nobel prize can only be shared by a maximum of three people, Kwon Young-wan was marginalized, especially as the division of labor at Q-Centre became less important and he was only responsible for the measurement of SQUID.

Publish First or Perish: The Race to the Nobel

So, in March 2023, after a fierce conflict, Kwon Young-wan was fired by Q-Centre.

With the positions of Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim firmly established as two of the possible three creators of LK99, Kwon Young-wan knew that if he wanted to secure his place that he’d need to knock Kim Hyun-jo out of contention and establish himself on the list of LK99 contributors and secure his place for the Nobel.

In a last-ditch effort to secure his spot, at 7 a.m. on July 22nd , Kwon Young-wan pre-emptively published the first paper about LK99 on arXiv. Although the research on LK-99 wasn’t perfect at the time, and as Professor Choi Dong-sik had warned years before, it’s never a good idea to publish a paper too early, Kwon Young-wan was nevertheless throwing up his Hail Mary to secure his place.

Seeing what he’d done, Ji-Hoon Kim and Sukbae Lee were forced to publish their own pre-print a half hour later, making sure that Kwon Young-wan’s name was nowhere to be found, but still aware that an exacting recipe had not been reliably developed or that could be continuously replicated.

The furor and doubt from the scientific community has since then been intense as labs all around the world have been unable to replicate the results and LK99 has been resoundingly scolded as being pure bunk.

Is LK99 a Superconductor or Not?

But here’s the thing that tickles my imagination – one that comes to mind as I think about the ham in my family and how it’d been cut for generations for no other reason other than the first pan had been too small, and that thanks to this pan problem there are now always two very delicious end pieces that everyone fights over – Ji-Hoon Kim has now stated that in two weeks from today he’ll conduct an experiment for the whole world to see that proves what he and Sukbae Lee contend is the real deal and will explain why no one’s been able to duplicate their results.

A Future of Boundless Potential: The Effects of LK99

I, for one, am an optimist. I believe that humanity has the creativity and capabilities to invent new and important things that will help lead us all out of the apparent death spiral of climate change, rampant fossil fuel use, and devastation that we seem to find ourselves in.

And while the discovery of a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor will help to greatly mitigate a lot of the energy loss, transfer, and storage issues needed to make our planet immediately 25% more electrically efficient and thereby able to reduce a large swath of greenhouse gasses – amongst many other revolutionary and beneficial inventions that will no doubt be created – and might sound to be too good to be true, I’m going to place my faith in the long history of accidental discoveries that has shaped our planet in more way than can be imagined.

With this in mind, I’m going to put my trust in the reality of LK99 and the team behind it, firstly because I have nothing to lose in hoping that it heralds in a new age of prosperity, and secondly because I believe in the underdog and trust that sometimes they really do often manage to pull rabbits out of the hat and create revolutionary change.

If nothing else, the publicity around the potential for room temperature, ambient pressure semiconductors has already convinced the Korean government to invest 2.5 billion more into its discovery, with 10’s of billions more just now being invested by other countries worldwide.

So ultimately, regardless of the success of LK99, with future innovations no doubt coming from the advances that’ll be discovered thanks to this huge funding influx, I have no doubt that in very short order we’ll all stand to be the beneficiaries of the radical new discoveries to come.

Sometimes all it takes is a little push or even the fear of missing out…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.