The below animation shows a selection of important features to superconductivity and how they evolve as the materials are heated up to their critical temperature.
Notice how for most features, there is a sweet spot for the highest superconductivity. It also seems that the first materials to disappear (meaning we're past their Tc) are the furthest from this sweet spot.
Here we showcase a few key latent features and their relationships to each other, points colored by their Tc. We animate from 0 K to ~130 K.
Intuitively this makes sense. We're maintaining a delicate balance to keep the superconducting state. Too much of one factor and we lose it, too little of another and we lose it too. Unfortunately, this does make our task a little more difficult since we can't just maximize some feature.
This being said, we don't actually know if this is true or not because we're completely biased by the dataset and history we're working with. Just because there's a lot of materials in this dataset that behave this way does not guarantee that's how all superconductors are.
Looking at some more of the physical properties we have available as part of the 3DSC dataset, we do see that this idea holds. However, we do see some features where it is good to max/minimize on that feature, for example minimize totreldiff, minimize band gap, and obviously minimize energy above the hull.
We find a similar idea that high-Tc materials form clusters and are generally a sweet spot within the range of a feature's values.
What I'm curious about is if we're going to find a room temperature superconductor in these same high-Tc clusters or if there are different sections of the feature space we should be exploring instead. Unfortunately I haven't found any data for high-Tc superconductors beyond the cuprates we show here, because what if it's not a cuprate at all and instead some hydride or other class (and still working at ambient pressure)?
I'm still working towards a physical understanding of these properties. I'm hoping that will illuminate some principles we can apply to design, no matter the material family or class.
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