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Notes -
Yeah I saw that one hahaha. Such a tiny speck floating, it could easily have just been clinging to the needle or something, but I definitely want to believe. If it's a real superconductor, 1) stuff like that should be possible, but 2) why are they not just experimenting using the original materials? Replication (at least, validation of the claims) should be easy with the actual material on hand.
The original protocol is trivial by superconductor (or even semiconductor!) research standards, but it's still filled with a number of individual materials that are expensive, controlled, or absolutely aren't safe to run in an apartment, along with a couple steps that require a long time with uncommon tooling. Iris_IGB's proposed approach cuts out some nasty chemicals and nearly half of the synthesis time; she probably just wouldn't have tried the original protocol at all.
Of course, optimizations only help if it works...
Of course. What I meant was, why not test the original material which the original researchers have already created? I'm dying to get some external validation and true replication could take months/years.
Not sure what's going on at that level. Most people seem convinced that the South Korean lab must be sending out samples for testing, or at least talking in person with MIT-level experts, but outside of saying that it's planned I've not seen much. The sorta people who have big XRD toolkits don't tend to spend too much time speculating on twitter, though.
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