The record
A century of progress, and thirty-three years of nothing.
Every ambient-pressure record since 1911. The climb, the stall, and the empty band that is the whole opportunity.
How the record was built
Nineteen kelvin in the first sixty-two years. Then a hundred kelvin in seven. Then nothing. Every entry below was found the same way, one compound at a time, by people guessing well, and that method has now been out of ideas for a third of a century.
| Year | Material | Tc |
|---|---|---|
| 1911 | Hg | 4.2 K |
| 1941 | NbN | 16 K |
| 1954 | Nb₃Sn | 18.3 K |
| 1973 | Nb₃Ge | 23.2 K |
| 1986 | La-Ba-Cu-O | 35 K |
| 1987 | YBCO | 92 K |
| 1988 | Tl-2223 | 122 K |
| 1993 | Hg-1223 | 135 K |
What Houston actually did
In 2026 a group in Houston reported 151 K in Hg-1223 at ambient pressure. They squeezed the material in a diamond anvil cell until it took a structure it would not otherwise hold, then released the pressure fast enough to trap it there. That is what pressure-quenched means, and it is a genuinely impressive piece of physics.
It is also not a conductor. The phase survives about three days at 77 K, it is gone above 200 K, and the samples are flakes tens of microns across. Nobody can wind a magnet from it. Read carefully, it makes the case on this page sharper rather than softer: the record finally moved, and what moved it was a process applied to a thirty-three-year-old compound.
The empty band
The durable record is 135 K, set in 1993, and it stood for 33 years. A warm room is 158 kelvin above it. Nothing at ambient pressure has crossed that, and nobody is going to guess their way across it one compound at a time. Searching that band is what we built the platform to do.
How the search actually runs is on the technology page