Electron-phonon coupling strength from ab initio frozen-phonon approach

Abstract

We propose a fast method for high-throughput screening of potential superconducting materials. The method is based on calculating metallic screening of zone-center phonon modes, which provides an accurate estimate for the electron-phonon coupling strength. This method is complementary to the recently proposed Rigid Muffin Tin (RMT) method, which amounts to integrating the electron-phonon coupling over the entire Brillouin zone (as opposed to the zone center), but in a relatively inferior approximation. We illustrate the use of this method by applying it to MgB${}_{\text{2}}$, where the high-temperature superconductivity is known to be driven largely by the zone-center modes, and compare it to a sister compound AlB${}_{\text{2}}$. We further illustrate the usage of this descriptor by screening a large number of binary hydrides, for which accurate first-principle calculations of electron-phonon coupling have been recently published. Together with the RMT descriptor, this method opens a way to perform initial high-throughput screening in search of conventional superconductors via machine learning or data mining.

References in corpus (2)

• Superconductive "sodalite"-like clathrate calcium hydride at high pressures
• Electron-phonon coupling mechanisms for hydrogen-rich metals at high pressure

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Prediction of Van Hove singularity systems in ternary borides