Thread by @condensed_the

It is now time to do the unpleasant: deconstruct the non-experimental parts of the Korean room temp SC claims. This is relevant because the theoretical/background SC discussions in these papers are so naïve that if it were an undergraduate project at Maryland we would give an F

First, strange sentences throughout both papers showing that the authors know little to nothing about SC. We emphasize that their ignorance about SC theories does not necessarily invalidate their experimental findings, but it raises serious issues about their expertise...

"To discover a room-temperature superconductor, observing the emergence of a metallic phase through an insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) at temperatures higher than room temperature is crucial"
We have no idea what this means-- 3D SC is not a metal-insulator transition ever

Throughout 2307.12037, Ref. 24 is mentioned as a key theoretical reference. This work, which provides a radical hole-based SC theory contrasting with the universally accepted SC theories, is not accepted by the community at all (to put it mildly): "The theory of ...

...hole superconductivity suggested much higher Tc than that proposed in BCS theory [24]" It is unclear that the current authors are even aware of the controversial nature of their Ref. 24. This dependence on Ref. 24 as a mechanism for their findings is bizarre and disturbing

From the Conclusion of 2307.12037: "On-site Coulomb repulsive interaction increased by volume contractions(1st and 2nd) may cause the superconducting phenomenon, as mentioned in the BR-BCS theory" This is total nuts-- the BR is Ref. 17, a well-known work
journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/1…

The problem is that this BR, the celebrated Brinkman-Rice theory has NOTHING whatsoever to do with SC, it is a classic work for interaction-driven metal-insulator transition through an effective mass divergence using the Gutzwiller method. There is nothing called BR-BCS theory..

except in the fantasy of the third coauthor HT Kim who wrote a paper in 2017 on "high-Tc mechanism through analysis of diverging effective mass.." which was never published (because it is manifestly insane as far as we can tell) and which received only 2 outside citations!

Let us hope that the explanation for whatever is reported in these Korean papers does not lie in this "BR-BCS theory" Ref. 10 in 2307.12037, because the theory is absurd

Curiously, 2307.12008 cites as Ref. 52 a recent version of BR-BCS theory published in a journal which does not reject papers Sci Rep 11 , 10329 (2021) The underlying claim is so absurd that we cannot even laugh. The claim is that an effective divergent mass is...

..an effective divergence in the density of states, and since T_c in the BCS theory depends exponentially on the density of states, an effective mass divergence implies a T_c divergence. This mistake falls in the 'not even wring' category, and we will not critique it further

2307.12008 is written as a materials science paper (and not as a standard physics paper), making it more palatable because it just presents the data directly, but it claims that the "Debye temperature" is strongly dependent on the sample temperature which is very strange

It says: ""Figure 4 shows that the Debye temperature of LK-99 is constantly
changing from about 184 K to 1300 K" Here is Fig. 4 and we have no idea what to make of it except in the sense of just meaningless fitting to an inapplicable formula

Nothing in what we say in this tweet thread invalidates the experimental claims in these papers, which can only be verified (or not) through actual experiments in independent laboratories. We hope that such verification process is already underway in many labs