Scientists finally created a 'holy grail' superconductor that doesn't fall apart when you bring it back to normal room pressure.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.14051
The Takeaway
Superhydrides can conduct electricity with zero resistance at high temperatures, but they usually only exist under crushing planetary pressures. Researchers successfully synthesized a barium-silicon hydride that remains stable and functional even after it's removed from the high-pressure press, solving a major bottleneck for using these materials in the real world.
From the abstract
Reducing the stabilization pressure of superhydrides represents one of the most important challenges in hydrogen-saturated compound chemistry. Moving in this direction, we studied the Ba-Si-H system at 0-142 GPa using transport measurements, 1H nuclear magnetic resonance, single-crystal and powder X-ray diffraction in the temperature range of 4-317 K. We synthesized the previously predicted cubic BaSiH$_{8}$ at pressures of 18-31 GPa. Remarkably, we demonstrate that BaSiH$_8$ remains stable upon