Physicists Shatter 33-Year Superconductivity Record With 151 Kelvin Breakthrough at Ambient Pressure

Physicists at the University of Houston have broken one of the most enduring records in condensed matter physics, achieving superconductivity at 151 Kelvin — minus 122 degrees Celsius — at ambient atmospheric pressure. The achievement, published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surpasses the previous record of 133 Kelvin set in 1993 by the same research group using a mercury-based copper-oxide ceramic.

Superconductivity is the phenomenon by which certain materials conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled below a critical temperature, allowing current to flow indefinitely without energy loss. The technology has transformative potential for power grids — the United States loses roughly 8 percent of all electricity generated to resistive heat as it travels through transmission lines — but practical deployment has been limited because all known ambient-pressure superconductors require cooling to temperatures far below any achievable without expensive liquid nitrogen or liquid helium systems.

The breakthrough was achieved by a team led by physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng using a technique they call "pressure quenching." The method involves compressing the mercury barium calcium copper oxide material — the same general class of compound that set the 1993 record — to very high pressures, which temporarily boosts its superconducting transition temperature to above 160 Kelvin, then cooling the material while still under pressure before releasing the pressure rapidly. The rapid pressure release locks the crystal lattice into a strained state that preserves a substantial portion of the performance enhancement.

The result is a material that superconducts at 151 Kelvin under ordinary air pressure — an 18-Kelvin improvement over the previous record that has stood for 33 years. Room temperature, approximately 295 Kelvin, remains the ultimate goal of the field, and 151 Kelvin is still far below freezing. But the Houston team's result demonstrates that the ceiling on cuprate superconductivity may be higher than theorists had predicted, and that structural engineering of the crystal lattice can substitute in part for brute-force cooling.

"Every jump in the critical temperature teaches us something fundamentally new about the pairing mechanism," Chu said in a statement. "We now have a material and a method we can study in much more detail to understand why this works and how much further we can push it." The paper has already drawn attention from groups at MIT, Stanford, and the Max Planck Institute, which are reportedly attempting to reproduce the result and extend the technique to other cuprate families. If confirmed and improved upon, pressure-quenched cuprates could eventually be used in practical devices that need only liquid nitrogen cooling — a far cheaper and more accessible technology than liquid helium.