Superconductivity of novel tin hydrides (Sn(n)H(m)) under pressure

M Mahdi Davari Esfahani; Zhenhai Wang; Artem R Oganov; Huafeng Dong; Qiang Zhu; Shengnan Wang; Maksim S Rakitin; Xiang-Feng Zhou

doi:10.1038/srep22873

Superconductivity of novel tin hydrides (Sn(n)H(m)) under pressure

Sci Rep. 2016 Mar 11:6:22873. doi: 10.1038/srep22873.

Authors

M Mahdi Davari Esfahani¹, Zhenhai Wang^{1

2}, Artem R Oganov^{1

3

4

5}, Huafeng Dong¹, Qiang Zhu¹, Shengnan Wang¹, Maksim S Rakitin¹, Xiang-Feng Zhou^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geosciences, Center for Materials by Design, and Institute for Advanced Computational Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2100, USA.
² Peter Grunberg Research Center, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210003, China.
³ Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Skolkovo Innovation Center, 3 Nobel St., Moscow 143026, Russia.
⁴ Department of Problems of Physics and Energetics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, 9 Institutskiy Lane, Dolgoprudny City, Moscow Region 141700, Russia.
⁵ International Center for Materials Discovery, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710072, People's Republic of China.
⁶ School of Physics and Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.

Abstract

With the motivation of discovering high-temperature superconductors, evolutionary algorithm USPEX is employed to search for all stable compounds in the Sn-H system. In addition to the traditional SnH4, new hydrides SnH8, SnH12 and SnH14 are found to be thermodynamically stable at high pressure. Dynamical stability and superconductivity of tin hydrides are systematically investigated. I4m2-SnH8, C2/m-SnH12 and C2/m-SnH14 exhibit higher superconducting transition temperatures of 81, 93 and 97 K compared to the traditional compound SnH4 with Tc of 52 K at 200 GPa. An interesting bent H3-group in I4m2-SnH8 and novel linear H in C2/m-SnH12 are observed. All the new tin hydrides remain metallic over their predicted range of stability. The intermediate-frequency wagging and bending vibrations have more contribution to electron-phonon coupling parameter than high-frequency stretching vibrations of H2 and H3.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.