Data-driven exploration of new pressure-induced superconductivity in PbBi₂Te₄

ABSTRACT

Candidate compounds for new thermoelectric and superconducting materials, which have narrow band gap and flat bands near band edges, were exhaustively searched by the high-throughput first-principles calculation from an inorganic materials database named AtomWork. We focused on PbBi₂Te₄ which has the similar electronic band structure and the same crystal structure with those of a pressure-induced superconductor SnBi₂Se₄ explored by the same data-driven approach. The PbBi₂Te₄ was successfully synthesized as single crystals using a melt and slow cooling method. The core level X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis revealed Pb²⁺, Bi³⁺ and Te^2- valence states in PbBi₂Te₄. The thermoelectric properties of the PbBi₂Te₄ sample were measured at ambient pressure and the electrical resistance was also evaluated under high pressure using a diamond anvil cell with boron-doped diamond electrodes. The resistance decreased with increasing of the pressure, and pressure-induced superconducting transitions were discovered at 2.5 K under 10 GPa. The maximum superconducting transition temperature increased up to 8.4 K at 21.7 GPa. The data-driven approach shows promising power to accelerate the discovery of new thermoelectric and superconducting materials.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Data-driven
• superconductivity
• high-pressure

CLASSIFICATION:

• 60 New topics / Others
• 404 Materials informatics / Genomics
• 302 Crystallization / Heat treatment / Crystal growth
• 210 Thermoelectronics / Thermal transport / insulators

Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the “Materials research by Information Integration” Initiative (MI²I) project of the Support Program for Starting Up Innovation Hub from JST. The part of the high pressure experiments was supported by the Visiting Researcher’s Program of Geodynamics Research Center, Ehime University. The computation in this study was performed on Numerical Materials Simulator at NIMS. The authors thank Dr N. Kataoka (University of Okayama) for interpretation of XPS results.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology [JPMJCR16Q6]; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI [JP17J05926]; JST-Mirai Program [JPMJMI17A2]; A part of the fabrication process of diamond electrodes was supported by NIMS Nanofabrication Platform in Nanotechnology Platform Project sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan.