In 1911, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes made a paradigm-shifting discovery: at a few degrees above absolute zero, mercury completely lost its electrical resistance. This meant that with the right conditions, electrical currents could travel indefinitely without losing power as it passed through matter.
Scientists soon realized that this feature, dubbed superconductivity, wasn’t just limited to mercury. Specific quantum mechanical effects enable superconductivity, so other elements could exhibit these properties under the right conditions. Eventually, physicists found a way to bring superconducting materials into wires and magnets, which opened up entirely new avenues for testing and utilizing weird quantum phenomena. For instance, our best quantum computers and particle accelerators rely on superconducting materials to operate. You don’t even have to be a physicist to have been close to one if you’ve ever taken an MRI.
Unfortunately, superconductors still require incredibly low temperatures to function, which complicates things. For example, in the case of quantum computers, noise reduction and error correction remain a major hurdle requiring near-zero Kelvin temperatures for their qubits.
Naturally, scientists want to ramp up the temperature threshold for superconductors—to develop “room-temperature” superconductors, so to speak. The jury’s still out on whether that’s at all feasible. But researchers have been hard at work finding new combinations and designs to coax superconductors into warmer and warmer conditions. And, they’ve made some progress to that end.
For this Giz Asks, we asked researchers for a breakdown of the status quo. What kind of progress has the community made in recent times? What are some promising candidates for room-temperature (or somewhere in that regime) superconductors? What are some remaining challenges for researchers, and how are they addressing them? The following responses may have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
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