First-principles investigation of the electron-phonon interaction in OsN${}_2$: Theoretical prediction of superconductivity mediated by N-N covalent bonds

Abstract

A first-principles investigation of the electron-phonon interaction in the recently synthesized osmium dinitride (OsN${}_2$) compound predicts that the material is a superconductor. Superconductivity in OsN${}_2$ would originate from the stretching of covalently bonded dinitrogen units embedded in the transition-metal matrix, thus adding dinitrides to the class of superconductors containing covalently bonded light elements. The dinitrogen vibrations are strongly coupled to the electronic states at the Fermi level and generate narrow peaks in the Eliashberg spectral function ${\alpha }^{2}F(\omega )$. The total electron-phonon coupling of OsN${}_2$ is $\lambda =0.37$ and the estimated superconducting temperature T${}_c\approx 1$ K. We suggest that the superconducting temperature can be substantially increased by hole doping of the pristine compound and show that T${}_c$ increases to 4 K with a doping concentration of 0.25 holes/OsN${}_2$ unit.

arXiv comment4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Phonons and related properties of extended systems from density-functional perturbation theory
• Superconductivity of metallic boron in MgB_2
• Superconductivity in diamond
• Superconductivity in the Intercalated Graphite Compounds C6Yb and C6Ca
• Ab-initio theory of superconductivity - I: Density functional formalism and approximate functionals
• A superconductor to superfluid phase transition in liquid metallic hydrogen
• Ab-initio theory of superconductivity - II: Applications to elemental metals

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The Maximum $T_c$ of Conventional Superconductors at Ambient Pressure