PATH OF RESISTANCE

Other teams working with hydrogen compounds, called hydrides, have observed superconductivity at high temperatures, but had to squeeze their samples to hundreds of gigapascals (GPa) - millions of times more than atmospheric pressure. In 2015, Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues reported3 a Tc of -70 °C (203 K) in hydrogen sulfide at about 145 GPa. [...]in October 2020, Dias's group announced in its Nature paper2 that it had reached room temperature - about 15 °C (288 K) - by squeezing a mixture of hydrogen, sulfur and carbon (CSH) to around 267 GPa. Physicists Dirk van der Marei at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Jorge Hirsch at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Hamlin, took aim at its results on magnetic susceptibility, a measure of how much a material is magnetized when exposed to an external magnetic field5.