In July 2023, a small Korean lab called Q-Centre posted two preprints claiming a material called LK-99 — a copper-doped lead apatite — was a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. The internet lost its mind. Stock markets moved. Twitch streamers watched replication attempts live. A Chinese researcher uploaded a levitation video to Bilibili that got 4.5 million views in nine hours. For approximately two weeks, it felt like humanity might have stumbled into the most transformative materials discovery of the century — a substance that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature and normal pressure, which would transform power grids, computing, transportation, medical imaging, and essentially every system that moves electrons through wire.
It wasn’t real. Within a month, labs worldwide had synthesized LK-99 and found no superconductivity. No zero resistance. No Meissner effect. No flux pinning. The partial levitation in the original Korean video turned out to be a ferromagnetic impurity — copper sulfide — not a superconducting phenomenon. A comprehensive rebuttal by Georgescu and colleagues, updated in early 2025 and published in Chemistry of Materials, dismantled the original claims point by point. LK-99 was a semiconductor with interesting magnetic properties. It was not a superconductor at any temperature.
But LK-99 was only the most public failure. The field’s deeper wound came from Ranga Dias.
The Dias fraud
Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, published a paper in Nature in October 2020 claiming room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride under extreme pressure — roughly 267 gigapascals, the kind of pressure found near Earth’s core. Nature had actually ignored the majority opinion of its peer reviewers, who expressed serious concerns. The paper launched Dias to fame. Rochester doubled his salary. Venture capitalists courted his startup, Unearthly Materials, which raised $17 million to commercialize the discovery. Nobody could reproduce the results.
In 2022, physicist James Hamlin at the University of Florida discovered that a section of the magnetic susceptibility data in Dias’s paper appeared to have been copied and pasted from one temperature range to another. Hamlin also found that Dias had plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis from Hamlin’s own earlier thesis. Nature retracted the 2020 paper in September 2022.
Dias responded by publishing another room-temperature superconductor claim in Nature in March 2023 — nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride, this time at near-ambient pressure. The paper went through extra review. It didn’t matter. Other labs couldn’t replicate the results. Dias’s own graduate students contacted Nature with concerns about data validity. That paper was retracted in November 2023. A third retraction followed in Physical Review Letters. Then a fourth, then a fifth.
In March 2024, a University of Rochester investigation — conducted by external physicists at the National Science Foundation’s request — concluded that Dias had engaged in “falsification, fabrication, and/or plagiarism of data, images, and text.” He was stripped of his students and laboratories. As of November 2024, he is no longer employed at Rochester. Five papers retracted. Millions in grants. A $17 million startup. And not a single reproducible result. As Lilia Boeri at Sapienza University of Rome put it, Dias’s “inconsiderate behaviour has harmed the reputation of the field.” James Hamlin, the physicist who caught the fraud, was more direct: the saga is “damaging to science in general, and superconductivity research more so.”
Where the field actually stands
Strip away LK-99 and Dias, and the legitimate science of superconductivity is in a more interesting place than the fraud cycle suggests. The highest confirmed superconducting temperature at ambient pressure remains around 135 Kelvin (-138°C), achieved in cuprate superconductors — the copper-containing ceramics discovered in 1986 that earned Bednorz and Müller the Nobel Prize. Under extreme pressure, lanthanum decahydride superconducts at 250 Kelvin (-23°C) at 150 gigapascals — genuinely close to room temperature, but at pressures that require diamond anvil cells and have no practical application.
The real action is in nickelates. In February 2025, researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford achieved a breakthrough that got far less public attention than LK-99 but matters considerably more: they stabilized a nickelate superconductor at room pressure for the first time. Nickelates are chemically similar to cuprates — the same class that holds the ambient-pressure temperature record — and had previously shown superconducting behavior only under extreme pressure. The SLAC team demonstrated that lateral compression from a substrate could stabilize the material without the diamond anvil cells that make high-pressure experiments impractical. This doesn’t mean nickelates superconduct at room temperature. They don’t, not yet. But it means researchers can now study them using advanced techniques like X-ray scattering that were impossible when the materials only existed under crushing pressure. The constraint has shifted from “can we make it at all” to “can we understand it well enough to improve it.”
A separate advance came from Penn State in October 2025, where researchers used a framework called zentropy theory — merging statistical mechanics with quantum physics and computational modeling — to predict superconducting behavior from a material’s electronic structure. The approach correctly identified known superconductors and offered a method for screening candidate materials computationally rather than synthesizing thousands of compounds by trial and error.
Then in March 2026, a programmatic research agenda published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a multi-institutional team laid out the case for a coordinated global push toward room-temperature superconductivity. The paper noted that no fundamental physical laws prevent it — the barrier is engineering and materials science, not physics. Recent advances in pressure quenching of the cuprate Hg-1223 achieved a record critical temperature of 151 Kelvin at ambient pressure. The authors argued that combining ab-initio computational simulations — now capable of modeling materials at the nanometer scale, a tenfold improvement over capabilities just a few years ago — with machine learning and AI-driven materials screening could systematically push critical temperatures higher. The paper reads less like a research summary and more like a call to arms: join forces worldwide, use modern computational tools, and treat room-temperature superconductivity as an engineering program rather than a lottery ticket.
Why it matters and why it’s hard
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor would eliminate the roughly 5 percent of electricity lost in transmission across the U.S. grid alone — a figure worth tens of billions of dollars annually and a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions without building a single new power plant. MRI machines, which currently require expensive liquid helium cooling for their superconducting magnets, could operate without cryogenics — relevant to anyone who’s read about the helium shortage and the supply chain fragility that makes every MRI refill a logistics problem. Maglev trains, which already use superconducting technology in Japan’s SCMaglev system, could become economically viable for mass transit instead of remaining engineering showcases. Particle accelerators, fusion reactors — where superconducting magnets are the enabling technology for plasma confinement — and quantum computers that currently require millikelvin temperatures to maintain superconducting qubits could all be transformed.
The difficulty is that we don’t fully understand how high-temperature superconductivity works. In conventional superconductors, the mechanism — electrons forming Cooper pairs through interaction with the crystal lattice — is well understood and was described by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957. But the cuprate superconductors that hold the temperature record don’t follow this mechanism. Something else is creating the electron pairing, and after nearly four decades of research, there’s no consensus on what it is. You can’t engineer your way to a higher critical temperature when you don’t have a complete theory for why the current record holders work. The nickelate breakthrough matters precisely because it gives researchers a new family of materials to study alongside cuprates — same neighborhood of the periodic table, different structure, potentially different mechanism — which means more data points for the theorists to work with.
The fraud problem is also a structural problem
LK-99 and Dias didn’t happen in a vacuum. The incentive structure of academic science — where a single Nature paper can double a salary, launch a startup, and generate millions in grant funding — creates enormous pressure to produce extraordinary results. Room-temperature superconductivity is the most sought-after prize in condensed matter physics. The gap between “promising measurement” and “confirmed superconductor” requires demonstrating zero resistance, the Meissner effect, flux pinning, a temperature-dependent critical field and current, and a specific heat anomaly. LK-99’s original papers demonstrated none of these. Nature published Dias’s first claim over reviewer objections. The field’s quality-control mechanisms failed at every level, from peer review to institutional investigation — Rochester cleared Dias three times before external reviewers found the fraud.
The March 2026 PNAS roadmap addresses this implicitly by calling for tighter integration between theory, computation, and experiment — essentially arguing that the field needs to stop waiting for someone to stumble onto a miracle material and start engineering candidates systematically. The AI-driven materials screening approach treats the problem the same way pharmaceutical companies treat drug discovery: model the candidates computationally, screen for promising properties, synthesize the top candidates, test rigorously, iterate. It’s less romantic than a eureka moment. It’s also less susceptible to fraud, because the computational predictions are independently verifiable before anyone walks into a lab.
Room-temperature superconductivity occupies a strange position: it’s the moonshot where the physics explicitly permits success, the engineering hasn’t delivered it, and the most famous recent claims turned out to be fabricated. The legitimate science — nickelate stabilization at SLAC, zentropy theory at Penn State, AI-accelerated materials screening, the 151 K ambient-pressure record in Hg-1223 — is advancing on a timeline measured in decades, not press cycles. We cover it alongside solid-state batteries, fusion energy, and space-based solar power in our Moonshot 2169 course — where each technology gets the same treatment: define what “done” actually means, name the constraints that prevent it, separate the press releases from the physics, and be honest about how far the gap between laboratory demonstration and deployable technology really is.