Theory Department
Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics
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Davydov, Arkadiy, Sanna, Antonio, Pellegrini, Camilla, Dewhurst, John Kay, Sharma, Sangeeta, Gross, Eberhardt

Ab initio theory of plasmonic superconductivity within the Eliashberg and density-functional formalisms
Physical Review B 102, (21),pp 214508/1-10 (2020)
We extend the two leading methods for the ab initio computational description of phonon-mediated superconductors, namely Eliashberg theory and density-functional theory for superconductors (SCDFT), to include plasmonic effects. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid formalism in which the Eliashberg approximation for the electron-phonon coupling is combined with the SCDFT treatment of the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction. The methods have been tested on a set of well-known conventional superconductors by studying how the plasmon contribution affects the phononic mechanism in determining the critical temperature (TC). Our simulations show that plasmonic SCDFT leads to a good agreement between predicted and measured TC's, whereas Eliashberg theory considerably overestimates the plasmon-mediated pairing and, therefore, TC. The hybrid approach, on the other hand, gives results close to SCDFT and overall in excellent agreement with experiments.