I don’t know if it’s real or not. I’ve downloaded and read the papers published; materials science isn’t my field, so all I can really do is look for egregious falsehoods set in place to bulk up the word count. I didn’t see anything obvious.

I think it’s interesting that there are several major scientific institutions replicating the experiment and running serious analyses of the outputs (First-principles study on the electronic structure… https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16040) (Origin of correlated isolated flat bands… https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892). Additionally, replications of the experiment are showing positive results (Meissner levitation of samples they synthesized themselves).

http://koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO202315638176796.page

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01516

If the big, famous labs are putting time and money into replicating the results and doing serious analysis, and are getting positive results (as well as successfully replicating the experimental results), that’s a pretty positive sign.