Classifying hydrogen-rich superconductors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes hydrogen-rich superconductors and finds they share properties with unconventional superconductors, suggesting they form a new class of such materials based on critical field data and Tc/Tf ratios.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis linking hydrogen-rich superconductors to unconventional superconductor behavior through critical field and Tc/Tf ratio comparisons.

Findings

Hydrogen-rich superconductors have Tc/Tf ratios typical of unconventional superconductors.

Superconductors in PdHx and ThH-ThD systems also fall into the unconventional superconductor band.

Hydrogen-rich superconductors should be classified as a new class of unconventional superconductors.

Abstract

The era of near-room-temperature superconductivity started after experimental discovery by Drozdov et al (2015 Nature 525 73) who found that compressed H3S exhibits superconducting transition at Tc = 203 K. To date, the record near-room-temperature superconductivity stands with another hydrogen-rich highly compressed compound, LaH10 (Somayazulu et al 2019 Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 027001), which has critical temperature of Tc>240 K. In this paper, we analyse available upper critical field, Bc2(T), data for LaH10 (Drozdov et al 2019 Nature 569 528) and report that this compound in all considered scenarios has the ratio of Tc to the Fermi temperature, Tf, 0.009 < Tc/Tf < 0.038, which is typical range for unconventional superconductors. In attempt to extend our finding, we examined experimental Bc2(T) data for superconductors in the palladium-hydrogen (PdHx) and thorium-hydrogen-deiterium (ThH-ThD) systems and surprisingly find that superconductors in both these systems also fall into unconventional superconductors band. Taking in account that H3S has the ratio of 0.012 < Tc/Tf < 0.039 (Talantsev 2019 Mod. Phys. Lett. B 33 1950195) we come to conclusion that in the Uemura plot all discovered to date hydrogen-rich superconductors, i.e., Th4H15-Th4D15, PdHx, H3S and LaH10 (in this list we do not include NbTiHx, PtHx, SiH4, and PH3 for which experimental data beyond Tc are unknown), lie in same band as all unconventional superconductors, particularly heavy fermions, fullerenes, pnictides, and cuprates, and former should be classified as a new class of unconventional superconductors.