Unifying guiding principles for designing optimized superconductors

TY - JOUR

T1 - Unifying guiding principles for designing optimized superconductors

AU - Weber, Cedric

PY - 2021/11/16

Y1 - 2021/11/16

N2 - Cuprate high-temperature superconductors (HTS), discovered in 1986, are the only practical superconductors which can operate at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) in any moderate magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and abundant and so is ideal. HTS has the capability to give clean energy across many application areas, for example, in motors, generators, power cables, levitation trains, fusion magnets, and medical imagery, and a huge effort has been put into the technological development over the last three decades, supported by intense theoretical investigations. An archetypal theory to model the copper oxides is the so-called Hubbard model. Such theories allow identification of key quantities that can provide markers to optimize the superconducting temperature (ideally, for room-temperature operations) and guide the chemical design of optimized materials. However, such endeavors are hampered by the many degrees of freedom, such as hole content, stoichiometry, covalency, and charge-transfer gap for the parent compound, and obtaining from the theory the key causal mechanisms for superconductivity is necessary to extract guiding principles (1, 2).

AB - Cuprate high-temperature superconductors (HTS), discovered in 1986, are the only practical superconductors which can operate at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) in any moderate magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and abundant and so is ideal. HTS has the capability to give clean energy across many application areas, for example, in motors, generators, power cables, levitation trains, fusion magnets, and medical imagery, and a huge effort has been put into the technological development over the last three decades, supported by intense theoretical investigations. An archetypal theory to model the copper oxides is the so-called Hubbard model. Such theories allow identification of key quantities that can provide markers to optimize the superconducting temperature (ideally, for room-temperature operations) and guide the chemical design of optimized materials. However, such endeavors are hampered by the many degrees of freedom, such as hole content, stoichiometry, covalency, and charge-transfer gap for the parent compound, and obtaining from the theory the key causal mechanisms for superconductivity is necessary to extract guiding principles (1, 2).

M3 - Article

SN - 0027-8424

SP - e2115874118

JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

M1 - 118

ER -