Room Temp Super Conductor: Break Out the Champagne?

[hutchphd]

TL;DR

Here we report superconductivity in a photochemically transformed carbonaceous sulfur hydride system, starting from elemental precursors, with a maximum superconducting transition temperature of 287.7 ± 1.2 kelvin (about 15 degrees Celsius) achieved at 267 ± 10 gigapascals.

Summary is from abstract in Nature.
Anybody know whether this is a big deal ?. It looks technically challenging (very high pressure) but great oaks from little acorns. I'm not current in superconductivity....

 

[Vanadium 50]

This looks better than the silver superconductors of past years.

It has been known for a long time that there exist substances that superconduct only at high pressure. Some superconductors, like YBCO, were discovered by taking an existing superconductor and doing a substitution that squeezes the structure: for example, Y for La in LBCO. Essentially, this is pressure induced by chemical processes.

This work moves the bar incrementally from LaH₁₀, at 250C and 170 GPa.

 

[Vanadium 50]

@ZapperZ knows much more about superconductivity than I do. Maybe he can jump in.

This is H2S-based and H2S is just weird.

 

[dRic2]

My thesis supervisor says it is a big deal. From what I understood recently people are trying to increase the critical temperature by adding hydrogen to various type of alloys (and it was experimentally confirmed that even at 1 atm, you can increase $T_c$ of some materials by adding H). So this gives hope to achieve higher temperatures (while working at lower pressure) by just doping the right material with hydrogen. This is what I understood.

 

[shjacks45]

This looks better than the silver superconductors of past years.

It has been known for a long time that there exist substances that superconduct only at high pressure. Some superconductors, like YBCO, were discovered by taking an existing superconductor and doing a substitution that squeezes the structure: for example, Y for La in LBCO. Essentially, this is pressure induced by chemical processes.

This work moves the bar incrementally from LaH₁₀, at 250C and 170 GPa.

"Squeeze the structure"; isn't Lanthanum a bigger ion than Yttrium? And even larger cations like Bismuth and Lead have been in recent Lit.