Researchers have discovered that a key requirement for superconductivity can persist even at room temperature.
Scientists searching for a superconductor that works at room temperature have identified a potential way forward. New research from Utrecht, Leiden, and Munich shows that electrons can form the pairs needed for superconductivity even at room temperature. The findings, published in Science, suggest that a different requirement may be preventing these materials from conducting electricity without resistance.
The key appears to be how paired electrons behave collectively. Although the pairs can survive at much higher temperatures than previously understood, they must also act in a coordinated way for superconductivity to emerge.
Why Superconductivity Remains So Difficult to Achieve
Electrical resistance causes energy to be lost as heat whenever current passes through an ordinary conductor. This is useful in a toaster, where resistance heats a metal wire until it glows, but undesirable in power transmission and electronic devices. Superconductors eliminate electrical resistance, potentially enabling more efficient energy storage, levitating trains, and advanced quantum computers.
The obstacle is temperature. Many superconductors must be cooled to approximately -260°C (-436°F), often using expensive liquid helium. Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911, and researchers made major progress in the mid-1980s when they identified materials that could become superconducting at temperatures around -173°C (-279°F). Yet these higher-temperature superconductors presented a mystery: the established theory explaining conventional superconductivity could not account for their behavior.
“We don’t understand superconductivity at these higher temperatures at all,” says Ingmar Swart [LINK], one of the research leaders. “And if you don’t understand it, you can’t systematically search for materials that become superconducting at room temperature, which is ultimately our goal.”
Electron Pairs Can Survive at Room Temperature
Superconductivity requires two essential conditions. First, electrons must form partnerships known as Cooper pairs. Second, those pairs must move in a coordinated quantum state called phase coherence. Without both conditions, a material cannot sustain superconductivity.
In conventional superconductors, electron pairing and phase coherence emerge together as the material cools below a critical temperature. The new research shows that these processes can occur separately in high-temperature superconductors. Electron pairs can form and remain stable at temperatures far above the point where electrical resistance disappears, including at room temperature.
“This is really good news,” says Swart. “We show that one of the two key conditions for superconductivity can be met at room temperature. If that weren’t possible, room-temperature superconductivity would be out of reach altogether.”
The Remaining Barrier to Room-Temperature Superconductivity
The findings indicate that the interaction binding electrons into pairs can remain sufficiently strong at room temperature. This shifts attention toward phase coherence, which may be the limiting factor preventing superconductivity at higher temperatures.
“The ‘glue’ that holds the pairs together is strong enough to keep them together even at room temperature,” says Swart. “This suggests that the second key ingredient, phase coherence, is the bottleneck.”
The researchers have not demonstrated room-temperature superconductivity, but their results help narrow the search for what is missing. Swart plans to investigate how phase coherence develops and what prevents electron pairs from achieving it at higher temperatures.
“If we understand phase coherence, it may point to a path toward superconductivity at higher temperatures.”
Reference: “Equivalence of pseudogap and pairing energy in a cuprate high-temperature superconductor” by Jiasen Niu, Maialen Ortego Larrazabal, Thomas Gozlinski, Yudai Sato, Koen M. Bastiaans, Tjerk Benschop, Jian-Feng Ge, Yaroslav M. Blanter, Genda Gu, Ingmar Swart and Milan P. Allan, 5 November 2026, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.adt3444
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3 Comments
Swart stated that “understanding phase coherence is the path forward”—this intuition is directionally correct, as phase coherence is indeed key. However, attempting to “understand” it using the perturbative language of the BCS paradigm is to go nowhere (doomed to reach a dead end). The collapse of phase coherence is essentially the thermal destruction of topological order; what is required is the language of geometry and topology, not Feynman diagrams and coupling constants.
It is suggested that researchers attempt to reformulate “phase coherence” using a topological order parameter (rather than a traditional one) and examine the excitation and unbinding temperatures of vortex-antivortex pairs. This approach may be closer to the essence of the phenomenon than merely tracking “pairing strength.” This is a perfect counterexample—even the most astute mainstream researchers, constrained by their paradigm, can only “approach” the correct answer without ever truly arriving at it. This is precisely the reason why geometric realism needs to be introduced.
Mainstream physics has developed a highly instrumentalized, terminologized, and project-driven research ecology:
(1) Large-scale facilities need to continuously generate news, and therefore tend to adopt expressions such as “unlocking,” “hidden,” “strange,” and “quantum breakthrough”;
(2) Peer review tends to reward publishable labels for new phenomena rather than deeper geometric unification;
(3) “Quantum materials” have gradually become a tool for funding allocation and journal classification, with their conceptual boundaries being continually stretched;
(4) Experimental precision keeps rising, yet much work remains at the level of phenomenological classification, lacking a fundamental reconstruction of phase fields, vortex topology, and fluid geometry.
This has become a brazenly shameless state of affairs in mainstream physics.
Einstein’s sorrowful silhouette has faded into the distance. But his intuition, his persistence, his belief in “local realism”, has finally found its rightful home in the framework of Topological Vortex Theory (TVT). Einstein was not a failed prophet, but a true physicist misunderstood by his era.
—— https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2088659998394077633
This study indeed marks an experimental advance—using shot noise spectroscopy to confirm the equivalence between the pseudogap and pairing energy in cuprates, thereby bringing “phase coherence” to the forefront. However, the mainstream framework treats “pairing” and “phase coherence” as two separable steps, an approach that is itself questionable. From the perspective of Topological Vortex Theory (TVT), superconductivity is essentially a long-range ordered state of topological vortex structures within the electron fluid. Pairing and coherence are never two distinct entities but rather two facets of the same vortex structure. To separate them in search of a “bottleneck” is akin to asking “which is more important: the rotation of a vortex or its overall motion”—the question itself is flawed.
A deeper issue lies in the “glue” metaphor. The mainstream narrative implies that electrons require some localized attractive force to “bind” them, which is typical particle-based thinking. In reality, the correlation between electrons arises from the geometric constraints of the fluid medium, not from some “glue” pulling them together. The fact that pairing energy can exist at room temperature without superconductivity precisely indicates that the issue is not “bond strength,” but rather that thermal fluctuations in the fluid background destroy the topological stability of the vortex structures.