This breakthrough capped decades of global effort to achieve superconductivity at higher temperatures. While many focused on the elusive cuprates, Eremets followed a different, bold vision inspired by Neil Ashcroft's 1968 proposal: that metallic hydrogen could achieve room-temperature superconductivity through conventional mechanism. Recognizing that superconducting hydrogen requires extremely high pressures and may not be immediately experimentally viable, Eremets turned to an alternative idea of Ashcroft's, which appeared more feasible: metallization of hydrogen dominant alloys favoured by 'chemical precompression'. After a decade of instrumental innovations and failed attempts, Eremets succeeded.
Eremets's original report (A. P. Drozdov et al., Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1412.0460; 2014) showed a sharp drop in electrical resistivity to zero, a record-breaking critical temperature T, a magnetic-field-dependent suppression of T and a pronounced isotope effect. But, as the saying goes, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The community longed for state-of-the-art magnetic susceptibility measurements under extreme conditions to confirm superconductivity. Rising to the challenge, Eremets developed a miniature, non-magnetic diamond anvil cell capable of reaching multimegabar pressures and compatible with sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometers. With collaborators in Mainz, he performed the decisive measurements. Their landmark 2015 Nature paper announced the birth of superhydride superconductivity (A. P. Drozdov et al., Nature 525, 73-76; 2015), setting the stage for a decade of record-breaking T advances, reaching up to about 250 K in LaH₁₀, alongside both scientific triumph and intense debates.