I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn’t newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It’s absolutely dripping with kook signifiers.
The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm are:
1) I’ve clicked around a bit, and there don’t seem to be any links on the site to any external page. They have a whole set of claims of dramatic breakthroughs in the transition temperature for their superconducting materials, a new one every couple of months, but no links to research papers, or other labs, or the arxiv. It’s just a collection of nested press releases.
2) The following paragraph, specifically the final sentence:
The volume fraction of this material is very low. Before commercialization is possible, a refinement method will need to be developed to increase the VF. As a result of a low VF, numerous R-T and magnetization tests may be necessary to see the respective transitions above the noise. This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research.
(the italics are standing in for an ugly yellow highlight in the original). This just screams “kook” to me– I’m surprised that it’s not followed by a solicitation of contributions to fund the research.
I could be way wrong, here. There could be some honest explanation for why there are no papers on the arxiv about this (at least, searching for authors named “Eck” (the only name I see on those pages) containing the word “thallium” (the key to their material) doesn’t turn up anything). It’s possible that the person or people behind this really are unjustly neglected geniuses producing real results in isolation.
But I wouldn’t bet any money on that, if I were you.