Room temperature superconductor from the Koreans

If this is verified there will be a Nobel Prize speeding its way to Korea. Well done guys! It was a small start up from a PhD student doing quantum computers.

The theory is remarkably simple. As you should know from your scientific general knowledge, normal super conductivity comes about by pairs of electrons called Cooper pairs which form at ground state energy, i.e. close to absolute zero. They are locked into this quantised energy state so can not lose less than a quantum's worth as this breaks QM rules. They keep on at the same energy level so have zero losses to energy transferred to the vibrational modes of the lattice they travel in, i.e. what we call heat.

However there is more than one way to move electrons without incurring losses, which is the object of the game.

The reason this is so simple is it is to do with the very first thing you learn about when doing quantum mechanics. It is the first example in all the text books! This is known as the quantum well. It's easy to picture as a golf ball that roles into a depression in the ground. One solution is a simple harmonic oscillator, a bit like a pendulum but a particle trapped in a well. It's bounded by energy walls and it has not got enough energy to jump back out of the hole. The classical analogue is easy to visualise but with a quantum version it can "tunnel" out of it. The way this works is pairs of quantities in physics can not be specified exactly, such as position and momentum. The better you know the position the less well informed you are about momentum, and so also it works with say position and energy. We know where it is cos it is bound in the well, but that makes its energy uncertain so there is a small chance it will jump out of a well it does not have enough energy to get out of. Welcome to the strange world of QM. We all learn this as students. No one thought though, what if you create a material with a series of quantum wells in the molecular structure and the elections just tunnel from one well to the next. They do, and they do it at room temperature and have been tested to work at 400C at normal pressure too. They were published in Nature.

Edit: rereading this I spotted a mistake. The Nature publication was a claim published prior to this. It turned out to be fake so many mention that in relation to LK99 to suggest LK99 was a similar claim. Sorry for the confusion. These guys want to publish in Nature but can't really do so now without verification, which does not look too lightly right now.