Materials Design for New Superconductors

TL;DR

This paper reviews efforts to apply materials genome concepts to the discovery of new superconductors, focusing on identifying design principles and periodic table analogues despite the complexity of superconductivity.

Contribution

It surveys existing approaches to materials design for superconductors and explores periodic table strategies to find new candidate materials.

Findings

Identification of potential cuprate analogues

Survey of materials design principles for superconductors

Discussion of challenges due to many-body nature of superconductivity

Abstract

Since the announcement in 2011 of the Materials Genome Initiative by the Obama administration, much attention has been given to the subject of materials design to accelerate the discovery of new materials that could have technological implications. Although having its biggest impact for more applied materials like batteries, there is increasing interest in applying these ideas to predict new superconductors. This is obviously a challenge, given that superconductivity is a many body phenomenon, with whole classes of known superconductors lacking a quantitative theory. Given this caveat, various efforts to formulate materials design principles for superconductors are reviewed here, with a focus on surveying the periodic table in an attempt to identify cuprate analogues.