For those who have been paying attention, recently there have been some positive results with diamagnetic levitation of small grains of LK99 from the original team and others in South Korea and China. This rules out an anisotropic paramagnetic effect, which makes sense considering the results we observed. NextBigFuture author Brian Wang has been doing great coverage of the ongoing developments.

It has been shown that sulfur dopes into the ceramic and doesn't solely form copper sulfide, and it is widely assumed that this is important to the process now.

SCTL showed that a vacuum furnace is not necessary for this synthesis. They also demonstrate that there appears to be quantum locking happening in the material, not solely diamagnetism. Even if all their samples were pure lead, it wouldn't be conductive enough for eddy currents to explain the scale of effects they demonstrate.

From our tests, we found that quartz tubes were not really usable, because the silica diffused into the LK99 ceramic. We recommend people trying to replicate this only use alumina containers.

With all this in mind, and with the race on to find the optimal process and composition, we will continue our LK99 experiments with an emphasis on making these experiments as easy as possible for everyone here to try and replicate. We recommend anyone trying this try it with a Tabletop Furnace. In a well ventilated area of course. I am not convinved that it is neccesary to start from elemental phosphorous or sulfur also - it should also be possible to start with phosphates, sulfates and sulfides to reduce any fume formation - some of our successful samples were made that way.