Comparison of highly-compressed C2/m-SnH12 superhydride with conventional superconductors

Abstract

Satterthwaite and Toepke (1970 Phys. Rev. Lett. 25 741) predicted high-temperature superconductivity in hydrogen-rich metallic alloys, based on an idea that these compounds should exhibit high Debye frequency of the proton lattice, which boosts the superconducting transition temperature, Tc. The idea has got full confirmation more than four decades later when Drozdov et al (2015 Nature 525 73) experimentally discovered near-room-temperature superconductivity in highly-compressed sulphur superhydride, H3S. To date, more than a dozen of high-temperature hydrogen-rich superconducting phases in Ba-H, Pr-H, P-H, Pt-H, Ce-H, Th-H, S-H, Y-H, La-H, and (La,Y)-H systems have been synthesized and, recently, Hong et al (2021 arXiv:2101.02846) reported on the discovery of C2/m-SnH12 phase with superconducting transition temperature of Tc ~ 70 K. Here we analyse the magnetoresistance data, R(T,B), of C2/m-SnH12 phase and report that this superhydride exhibits the ground state superconducting gap of $\Delta$(0) = 9.2 meV, the ratio of 2$\Delta$(0)/k$_B$Tc = 3.3, and 0.010 < Tc/Tf < 0.014 (where Tf is the Fermi temperature) and, thus, C2/m-SnH12 falls into unconventional superconductors band in the Uemura plot.