A Korean team claims it’s a ambient temperature supra conductor (it’s been 100 years that material physicists have been looking for one) . If true it’s a major discovery. Remember December 2019 when we heard about a new virus in Wuhan?
However,
It has been published on arxiv, where scientists share draft paper before final publication (so you get early results without loosing 2 years in review) meaning it hasn’t been peer reviewed. We talk about a major discovery, not about one more paper about quantum nanodots or a yet an algorithm to classify galaxies by shape using machine learning. In general, these ones are kept secret until publication and front page of a big journal.
To my understanding, on the recent development, one team couldn’t reproduce their experiment while another concluded that theoretically speaking LK99 could be superconducting
So basically, the 3 options are
It’s a it’s a fraud (but why fraud with such a high buzz tittle?)
— Paper is over optimistic but LK99 has nice property and is a milestone on the way (but again why come with such a big claim?)
— It’s really superconducting, and for some reasons they had to release an early preprint (may be another team was about to publish) which would be a major discovery