UC Berkeley

The past decade has witnessed great progress in predicting and synthesizing polyhydrides that exhibit superconductivity under pressure. Dopants allow these compounds to become metals at pressures lower than those required to metallize elemental hydrogen. Here, we show that by combining the fundamental planetary building blocks of molecular hydrogen and ammonia, conventional superconducting compounds can be formed at high pressure. Through extensive theoretical calculations, we predict metallic metastable structures with NH_n (n = 10, 11, 24) stoichiometries that are based on NH₄⁺ superalkali cations and complex hydrogenic lattices. The hydrogen atoms in the molecular cation contribute to the superconducting mechanism, and the estimated superconducting critical temperatures, T_c's, are comparable to the highest values computed for the alkali metal polyhydrides. The largest calculated (isotropic Eliashberg) T_c is ∼180 K for Pnma-NH₁₀ at 300 GPa. Our results suggest that other molecular cations can be mixed with hydrogen under pressure, yielding superconducting compounds.