Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Breaking the Wall to Room-Temperature Superconductivity

Mikhail Eremets

Physical Sciences Science Breakthrough of the Year

The nominating institution Max-Planck-Gesellschaft on the breakthrough:

The quest for unusual materials, such as metallic hydrogen or room-temperature superconductors, has been going on for decades. Mikhail Eremets has pioneered high pressure experiments to induce such states, which brought about innovations in materials science, but also high-pressure technology. The group has achieved recent breakthroughs in this field, including superconductivity at 203K in H3S (2015) and at 250 K in LaH10 (2019), or semimetallic hydrogen above 250 GPa (2019).

Mikhail Eremets

Max-Planck-Institut for Chemistry

Mikhail Eremets is currently a Group leader at the High Pressure Chemistry and Physics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. He is working in the fields of high pressure physics, chemistry and materials science and is known particularly for his research on superconductivity. After completing his PhD in Physics in Moscow in 1978, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for High Pressure Physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences for over 15 years before eventually becoming the director of the department of High Pressure Physics. He then went through stations in Tsukuba, Osaka and Washington D.C. before taking on his current role at the Max Planck Institute in 2001. During his career, Eremets has also completed numerous international stays as a visiting scientist and professor, including in Warsaw, Oxford (UK) and Tokyo.

Eremets is a member of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Sigma Xi the Scientific Research Honor Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is the recipient of numerous awards, for instance the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials of the American Physical Society (2020), the Bridgman Award (2017) and the Ugo Fano Gold Medal (2015). In 2020, he was named the Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year in Physical Sciences. In addition, he was mentioned as an author of one of the ten most remarkable papers in 2019 by Nature Magazine and was part of the list of the 10 milestones of 2015 by Physics World Magazine.

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