More than 100 years ago, the physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered that solid mercury acts as a superconductor. Now, for the first time, physicists have a complete microscopic understanding of why this is so. Using a modern first-principles computational method, a team from the University of L’Aquila, Italy, found several anomalies in mercury’s electronic and lattice properties, including a hitherto undescribed electron screening effect that promotes superconductivity by reducing repulsion between pairs of superconducting electrons. The team also determined the theoretical temperature at which mercury’s superconducting phase transition occurs – information previously absent from condensed-matter textbooks.

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