Will the number of published papers on LK-99 or similar derivatives exceed 300 before 2027?
19
161
390
2027
7%
chance

A paper counts as anything published in good faith by researchers who did actual work.

The papers must be published through a medium historically used for scienific papers.

Duplicates or re-uploads of the same paper don't count.

For something to count as a "similar derivitive" it must at least reference one of the original LK-99 papers.

"Meta Papers" about the reaction to LK-99 don't count. It must be on the topic of superconductivity or something similar.


I'm making this question because I wonder even if LK-99 is found to likely not be a RTAP superconductor whether researchers will continue to study it anyway. Obviously if it is a RTAP SC then this should resolve yes anyway.

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bought Ṁ60 of NO

300 papers before 2027 is almost 2 per week. This would make it a large enough subfield that you'd have LK-99 conferences and symposia. I just don't see this as within the bounds of reasonable expectation unless LK-99 is a RTAP superconductor.

Another way to think about it is that if a paper gets 300 citations in 3 years, that's pretty good already; but most citations are not directly about using the materials, but "about the materials" or "about the field" (often, very nonspecific), so 300 papers on LK-99 would mean at least 1,000 citations in 3 years (likely closer to 3,000), which would be extraordinary and put it on track to make it one of the highest cited papers ever (the 100th most cited paper ever is on the order of 12,000 citations: https://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224)

So, this becomes another "is LK-99 a superconductor?" market and it is predicting a much higher probability than the others

bought Ṁ80 of NO

I'm assuming LK-99 is a cold fusion type of situation, so I think that even if there are some cool properties to the material, it'll get stigmatized as crank-affiliated. Eventually this stigma might wear off if the properties really are interesting, but 2027 is too soon.

bought Ṁ25 of YES

Very bullish on this, it's a novel material with weird properties.