English

LaBH$_{8}$: the first high-T$_{c}$ low-pressure superhydride

Superconductivity 2021-08-04 v2

Abstract

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_{8}, with a Tc_{c} 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_{c} hydrides. LaBH8_{8} 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_{8} 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.

Keywords

Cite

@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}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table