Challenges in designing Room Temperature Superconductors
Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) L’Aquila, Italy
Organisers
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO COVID. NEW DATES WILL BE ANNOUNCED SOON.
The discovery of superconductivity with Tc> 200 K in SH3 and LaH10 at megabar pressure [1,2], has shown that room-temperature superconductivity, whose existence was often doubted, is now within reach. The aim of this workshop is to bring together experts in ab-initio superconductivity, crystal structure prediction, material informatics, as well as researchers in high-pressure and low-dimensional physics, to design new strategies for the discovery of better superconductors. This workshop the first after the LaH10 discoveries to actively promote cross-fertilization among different theoretical and experimental fields.
Room-temperature superconductivity is a long-standing scientific and technological dream. Last year, superconductivity at 260 K was found at 1.5 Mbar in lanthanum superhydride [2]. This demonstrated that Tc’s close-to-room-temperature are achievable in practice and that computational methods have reached a sufficient accuracy to predict new superconductors. In fact, both the SH3 and the LaH10 experimental discoveries were predicted by first-principles calculations [1-4] a few months before the experiment, a task which only five years ago would have been deemed impossible.
In the last 15 years we have witnessed tremendous breakthroughs solving de-facto the accuracy issues of ab-initio calculations for superconductors, i.e. to petaFLOP supercomputing facilities, the development of efficient approaches to compute the electron-phonon interaction and self-consistent anharmonic corrections, and first-principles theories of superconductivity .[5-7] Another fundamental step forward for the computational design of new superconductors, essential for the discovery of high-pressure hydrides, was the development of ab-initio crystal structure prediction which, combined with the convex hull construction, allow to identify promising thermodynamic conditions for a given material entirely on a computer, enabling in-silico synthesis.
Thus, at present, the scientific community has at disposal, for the first time in its history, theoretical and computational tools, to predict the existence of an ambient-conditions (pressure and temperature) superconducting material, its composition, its crystal structure and the synthesis conditions. [9]
The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading scientists in theoretical and computational superconductivity, material science and high-pressure research, from Europe, Asia and US, to discuss the exciting possibilities opened by the latest discovery.
To promote cross-fertilization of related fields, we will also invite researchers in Materials Informatics, which represents a very promising tool to explore unknown paths to high-Tc superconductivity [10] and low-dimensional systems, a fast growing playground for the search of new superconductors.
L’Aquila University belongs to the CECAM-IT-SIMUL node, which agreed to support the workshop.
References
Antonio Sanna (Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle) - Organiser
Italy
Lilia Boeri (Sapienza Universita' di Roma) - Organiser
Gianni Profeta (University of L'Aquila) - Organiser
United States
Richard Hennig (University of Florida) - Organiser
Peter Hirschfeld (Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville FL, 32611 USA) - Organiser