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.