(BFM Bourse) – The hopes of superconducting properties around this material have led to the surge on the stock market of certain Korean groups. But as scientific doubt settled on this find, their prices deflated.
The financial markets sometimes experience mirages, which arouse fleeting enthusiasm and which fall almost as quickly as it arrived, the time for investors to be brought back to reality. The craze around plant-based meat and the stock market performance of Beyond Meat (-90% over three years on Wall Street) can be one of these examples.
A new meteorite has appeared, with the stock market frenzy around LK-99, on which hopes were nevertheless very quickly dashed.
In July, a team of Korean researchers releases a pre-report, which has not been peer-reviewed by scientists or published in a journal. According to their work, LK-99, an alloy composed of lead and apatite, a rare and precious mineral, would have reached superconductivity in ambient air and at standard atmospheric pressure.
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Which, on paper, would be a huge step forward. Superconductivity quite simply consists of a material perfectly conducting electricity and therefore transmitting it without loss of energy.
“As the CEA (the atomic energy commission) reminds us, translated by specific electrical, magnetic and quantum properties, the phenomenon of superconductivity appears when certain metals or alloys are cooled to very low temperatures, close to zero. absolute, 0 kelvin or -273.15°C”, notes John Plassard de Mirabaud.
In ambient air this phenomenon does not exist until now, copper, for example, accusing a loss of energy.
Korean bands propelled
LK-99 could therefore hold significant promise in terms of efficiency and energy savings, by limiting greenhouse gases, with numerous applications.
The Korean study has de facto catalyzed the prices of several companies directly or indirectly concerned with superconductivity, and for the most part Korean companies little known to the general public, as noted by the wall street journal.
This was the case, for example, of Sunam, a company that manufactures high-temperature cables and electromagnets used in superconductors. Its share price was multiplied by approximately 3.5 between July 25 and August 7. Duksung, which produces materials and equipment related to semiconductors and superconductors, has seen its action more than triple over the same period.
Another example: Mobiis, a company present in fusion reactors and particle accelerators, saw its share price double. Beyond South Korea, American Superconductor, which as its name suggests specializes in power electronics and superconducting systems, saw its price on the Nasdaq double, from 7.5 dollars on July 27 over $16 on August 1.
But the market got carried away a little quickly. “Like all previous reports of such ‘unidentified superconducting objects’, the Korean team’s results will be ‘taken seriously’ when other groups replicate them and weigh in on whether these are of a real superconductor'”, told the wall street journalMichael Norman, condensed matter physicist at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
Important scientific doubts
And on this point the shoe pinches and not only a little. As our colleagues at BFM Tech point out, many groups of scientists have failed to successfully replicate the findings of Korean researchers.
Review Science raised doubts about their methodology. In early August, the Condensed Matter Physics Research Center at the University of Maryland, for its part, concluded in a series of posts on X (ex-Twitter) that “LK-99 (was) not a superconductor, even at room temperature (or very low temperature). “It’s a poor quality material […]. No need to fight with the truth. The data has spoken,” added this center, which then reported inconclusive results by researchers in China and India.
Last week, the site of the famous scientific journal Nature, was also affirmative: “LK-99 is not a superconductor”. According to him, scientists have concluded that the presence of impurities in the material, such as copper sulphides, may have caused a drop in electrical resistance and the appearance of magnetic properties similar to those of superconductors.
On the stock market, since the beginning of August, the values which had soared around the hopes on the LK-99 saw their course deflate. Sunam has since Aug. 7 seen its share price split by around 2.5, a split that registers by nearly 2 for Duksung. And so is American Superconductor, whose stock has gone from $16 on August 1 to $8.65 today.
“The validity of LK-99 is the subject of great skepticism, which is understandable”, judges UBS. However “research on superconductors at room temperature is very active and it is possible that such a material could be synthesized in the future”, adds the Swiss bank.
“It is important to note that a ‘new material’ discovered in the laboratory can take more than 20 years to be incorporated into industry, and that several other factors, such as the cost and lifespan of the material, such as cost and material properties (malleability), can play a role in end use/adoption cases.”
Not all stock market fevers are created equal. If that around the LK-99 has therefore made “pschitt”, the same cannot be said of the generative artificial intelligence, at the heart of ChatGPT and which has fueled the rise of certain titles such as that of Nvidia. But this technology currently has applications that are much more concrete than the hypothetical superconducting materials.
Julien Marion – ©2023 BFM Bourse