The synthesis of materials in high-pressure experiments has recently attracted increasing attention, especially since the discovery of record breaking superconducting temperatures in the sulfur-hydrogen and other hydrogen-rich systems. Commonly, the initial precursor in a high pressure experiment contains constituent elements that are known to form compounds at ambient conditions, however the discovery of high-pressure phases in systems immiscible under ambient conditions poses an additional materials design challenge. We performed an extensive multi component abinitio structural search in the immiscible Fe--Bi system at high pressure and report on the surprising discovery of two stable compounds at pressures above ≈36 GPa, FeBi2 and FeBi3. According to our predictions, FeBi2 is a metal at the border of magnetism with a conventional electron-phonon mediated superconducting transition temperature of Tc=1.3 K at 40 GPa. In analogy to other iron-based materials, FeBi2 is possibly a non-conventional superconductor with a real Tc significantly exceeding the values obtained within Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory.
@article{arxiv.1609.09536,
title = {Prediction of superconducting iron-bismuth intermetallic compounds at high pressure},
author = {Maximilian Amsler and S. Shahab Naghavi and Chris Wolverton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.09536},
year = {2016}
}