On Saturday 22 July 2023 a team of scientists based in Seoul, South Korea lead by researchers Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim announced in a pair of papers posted to the online physics archive arXiv.org that they have found a new material by doping copper into the mineral apatite which conducts electricity without resistance and expels static magnetic fields at room temperature and ambient pressure.
The new material emerged amid a surge of interest during recent years in copper-doped apatites as catalysts for a wide range of chemical reactions. The previous record-holder for the highest transition temperature to the superconducting state at ambient pressure also comes from a family of copper oxide ceramic materials originally studied for their catalytic ability. Large optical-quality single-crystal samples of apatite with metal dopant levels comparable to the new material were grown using the century-old Czochralski pulling method more than thirty years ago and found to make excellent room-temperature near-infrared lasers by a team lead by Stephen A. Payne and Laura DeLoach at the US Department of Energy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
Small polycrystalline samples of the new copper-doped apatite with the ability to push out magnetic fields and levitate above a magnet at room temperature and ambient pressure were grown live on social media around 4 August 2023 using Ji-Hoon Kim’s solid-state sintering method by the American hobbyist Andrew McCalip. The samples were reportedly sent to the University of Southern California (USC) for further study by the condensed matter physics group there. A former researcher in the group and the current Chair of Science at Science Synergy, Dr. Noah Bray-Ali, suggests looking for a sharp far-infrared resonance in the sample around a frequency of 571 inverse centimeters and a broad mid-infrared peak around 3525 inverse centimeters using the Bruker Vertex 80 Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometer in the Chemistry Instrumentation Facility at USC: The sum of the two resonance frequencies which comes out to roughly 4096 inverse centimeters corresponds to the inverse of the Compton wavelength of 2.44 microns for the particle known as the axion which Bray-Ali showed in August 2021 forms the dark matter of the Universe.