What superconducts in sulfur hydrides under pressure and why
By Noam Bernstein, C. Hellberg, Michael Johannes, I. Mazin, Michael J. Mehl. 2014
166 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The recent discovery of superconductivity at 190~K in highly compressed H$_{2}$S is spectacular not only because it sets a record high critical temperature, but because it does so in a material that appears to be, and we argue here that it is, a conventional strong-coupling BCS superconductor. Intriguingly, superconductivity in the observed pressure and temperature range was predicted theoretically in a similar compound H$_{3}$S. Several important questions about this remarkable result, however, are left unanswered: (1) Does the stoichiometry of the superconducting compound differ from the nominal composition, and could it be the predicted H$_{3}$S compound? (2) Is the physical origin of the anomalously high critical temperature related only to the high H phonon frequencies, or does strong electron-ion coupling play a role? We show that at experimentally relevant pressures H$_2$S is unstable, decomposing into H$_3$S and S, and that H$_3$S has a record high $T_c$ due to its covalent bonds driven metallic. The main reason for this extraordinarily high $T_c$ in H$_3$S as compared with MgB$_2$, another compound with a similar superconductivity mechanism, is the high vibrational frequency of the much lighter H atoms.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Geophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bef638154c25fb9a164ea824e45f7a08938ca89b
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
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Citations in the corpus
- Structure and superconductivity of hydrides at high pressures (2017, background): “underlined that the high-temperature superconductivity of H3S is attribute to strong covalent bonds giving rise to large electron-phonon couplings [87], which is similar to”
- Conventional superconductivity at 190 K at high pressures (2014, background): “Further theoretical works also considered H3S as responsible for the high temperature superconductivity [12-14].”