A group of scientists from Russia, China and the United States predicted and then experimentally obtained barium superhydrides, new unusual superconductors. The study was published in Nature Communications.
In their latest study, scientists from Oganov's laboratory and their colleagues from China and the United States analyzed all possible barium hydrides using the unique theoretical approaches developed by Oganov and his students and implemented in their USPEX code (uspex-team.org), and finally selected BaH12, a compound with one of the highest hydrogen contents. The researchers obtained the compound experimentally, demonstrated its superconductivity and studied its crystal structure. BaH12 turned out to be quite a remarkable compound with a structure formed by molecular groups of two and three hydrogen atoms and acting as a molecular superconductor. Thanks to its molecular structure, BaH12 is not a high-temperature superconductor: its critical temperature is -253 °C. The study marks significant progress in understanding what kind of structures may someday perform as room-temperature superconductors in real devices.
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