Searching Materials Space for Hydride Superconductors at Ambient Pressure

TL;DR

This study uses machine learning to identify potential hydride superconductors at ambient pressure, discovering about 50 promising compounds with transition temperatures above 20 K, highlighting new materials for experimental exploration.

Contribution

The paper introduces a machine-learning approach to discover ambient-pressure hydride superconductors, revealing diverse structures and compositions with high transition temperatures.

Findings

Approximately 50 compounds with Tc > 20 K identified

Most compounds are thermodynamically slightly unstable

Common composition involves alkali or alkali-earth elements with noble metals

Abstract

We employed a machine-learning assisted approach to search for superconducting hydrides under ambient pressure within an extensive dataset comprising over 150 000 compounds. Our investigation yielded around 50 systems with transition temperatures surpassing 20 K, and some even reaching above 70 K. These compounds have very different crystal structures, with different dimensionality, chemical composition, stoichiometry, and arrangement of the hydrogens. Interestingly, most of these systems displayed slight thermodynamic instability, implying that their synthesis would require conditions beyond ambient equilibrium. Moreover, we found a consistent chemical composition in the majority of these systems, which combines alkali or alkali-earth elements with noble metals. This observation suggests a promising avenue for future experimental investigations into high-temperature superconductivity within hydrides at ambient pressure.