It’s this immense promise (and likely a guaranteed Nobel Prize) that’s caused some furor in condensed-matter physics in recent years. Paper after paper claims to have found this elusive, superconducting White Whale, only for those hopes to be dashed along the rocky shores of reality.
Claims of room-temperature superconductivity date back to at least the year 2000, though many of them require immensely high pressures. A high-profile dud in recent memory came in October 2020, when a physicist from the University of Rochester in New York published a paper in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of a superconducting material at 59 degrees Fahrenheit (albeit under extreme pressure). The work captured tons of headlines, but Nature retracted the paper two years later after physicists failed to reproduce the results, citing “data-processing irregularities.”