The international workshop “Challenges in Designing Room Temperature Superconductors” will be held in L’Aquila, on July 26th-29th 2022.
Room-temperature superconductivity is a long-standing scientific and technological dream. Last year, superconductivity at 260 K was found at 1.5 Mbar in lanthanum superhydride [1]. This demonstrated that critical temperatures close-to-room-temperature are achievable in practice and that computational methods have reached a sufficient accuracy to predict new superconductors. In fact, both the SH3 and the LaH10 experimental discoveries were predicted by first-principles calculations [1-4] a few months before the experiment, a task which only five years ago would have been deemed impossible.
At present, the scientific community has at disposal, for the first time in its history, theoretical and computational tools, to predict the existence of an ambient-conditions (pressure and temperature) superconducting material, its composition, its crystal structure and the synthesis conditions. [5]
The aim of this workshop is to bring together international experts in ab-initio superconductivity, crystal structure prediction, material informatics, as well as researchers in high-pressure and low-dimensional physics, to design new strategies for the discovery of better superconductors. This workshop is the first after the LaH10 discovery to actively promote cross-fertilization among different theoretical and experimental fields.
More info available on the workshop website
[1] M. Somayazulu et al., PRL. 122 027001 (2019); A. P. Drozdov et al, Nature 569, 528 (2019)
[2] A. P. Drozdov, et al., Nature 525, 14964, (2015)
[3] F. Peng et al., PRL. 119, 107001 (2017).
[4] D. Duan et al, Sci. Rep. 4, 6968 (2014).
[5] J. A. Flores-Livas, cond-mat/1905.06693.
