Chemistry in Superconductors
Xin Gui, Bing Lv, Weiwei Xie
Abstract
Superconductors with exotic physical properties are critical to current and future technology. In this review, we highlight several important superconducting families and focus on their crystal structure, chemical bonding, and superconductivity correlations. We connect superconducting materials with chemical bonding interactions based on their structure-property relationships, elucidating our empirically chemical approaches and other methods used in the discovery of new superconductors. Furthermore, we provide some technical strategies to synthesize superconductors and basic but important characterization for chemists needed when reporting new superconductors. In the end, we share our thoughts on how to make new superconductors and where chemists can work on in the superconductivity field. This review is written using chemical terms, with a focus on providing some chemically intuitive thoughts on superconducting materials design.