The breakthrough material is a hydrogen compound called silane, composed of hydrogen and silicon.

Pure hydrogen has been seen as a potentially good superconductor, but has proven hard to work with in practice.

Researchers got around this by compressing silane to high pressure, which apparently obviates the need for cooling.

"If you put hydrogen compounds under enough pressure, you can get superconductivity," said Professor John Tse of the University of Saskatchewan.

"These new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant."

Virtually all superconductors require cooling to lower temperatures to be effective.

Room temperature superconductors could vastly improve existing applications such as MRI scanners and magnetic-levitation trains.

But they could also allow new components to be developed, such as superconducting wires.

“Validation of this hypothesis and understanding of the mechanism are initial steps for design of better superconducting materials,” said Professor Tse.

Silane is also being used by scientists at Penn State University in the United States and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom to create better optical fibres.

Their researchers have developed a process for growing a single-crystal semiconductor inside the tunnel of a hollow optical fibre.

Signals are often degraded by the interface between optical fibres and devices -- adding the semiconductor could be a solution to that problem

"We were able to embed a nanostructured crystal into the hollow tube of an optical fiber to create a completely new type of composite device," said Pier Sazio, senior research fellow in the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton.