In the last five years a large number of new high-temperature superconductors have been predicted and experimentally discovered among hydrogen-rich crystals, at pressures which are way too high to meet any practical application. In this work, we report the computational prediction of a hydride superconductor, LaBH8, with a Tc of 126 K at a pressure of 50 GPa, thermodynamically stable above 100 GPa, and dynamically stable down to 40 GPa, an unprecedentedly low pressure for high-Tc hydrides. LaBH8 can be seen as a ternary sodalite-like hydride, in which a metallic hydrogen sublattice is stabilized by the chemical pressure exerted by the guest elements. The combination of two elements with different atomic sizes in LaBH8 realizes a more efficient packing of atoms than in binary sodalite hydrides. A suitable choice of elements may be exploited to further reduce the stabilization pressure to ambient conditions.
@article{arxiv.2102.11227,
title = {LaBH$_{8}$: the first high-T$_{c}$ low-pressure superhydride},
author = {Simone Di Cataldo and Christoph Heil and Wolfgang von der Linden and Lilia Boeri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.11227},
year = {2021}
}