Superconducting hydrides and metallic hydrogen at megabar pressures
This text mentions work from 2024 on. Those parts were partly written without a live literature search and have not been checked by an editor yet.
Hydrogen-rich compounds squeezed to more than a million atmospheres in diamond anvil cells superconduct near 200 to 250 K, with one unreplicated 2025 report near 298 K. Pure hydrogen is predicted to become a metal, and possibly a room-temperature superconductor, at still higher pressure.
Why it matters
They are the highest-$T_{\mathrm{c}}$ superconductors known and test whether conventional phonon-mediated theory predicts $T_{\mathrm{c}}$ from first principles.
Review
A. P. Drozdov, M. I. Eremets, I. A. Troyan, V. Ksenofontov, S. I. Shylin, Conventional superconductivity at 203 kelvin at high pressures in the sulfur hydride system, Nature, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14964 reference checked
Timestamp record
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- Public log
- Entry 143, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.