Toward Hot Superconductivity

Realizing superconductivity in the vicinity of room temperature in hydrogen-rich materials under pressure is a topic of great current interest. Specifically, high-pressure experiments motivated by density-functional theory and conventional electron-phonon coupling models have uncovered new classes of hydrogen-rich metal hydrides, or superhydrides, with superconducting critical temperatures (Tc) in the vicinity of room-temperature at megabar pressures (i.e., >100 GPa). New findings, including studies of chemically more complex hydrides, open new avenues for creating potentially stable ‘hot’ hydrogen-rich superconductors above room temperature with parallels to the original predicdtions for atomic metallic hydrogen.

Host: James Hamlin and Peter Hirschfeld