Role of the Dopant in the Superconductivity of Diamond

Abstract

We present an ab initio study of the recently discovered superconductivity of boron doped diamond within the framework of a phonon-mediated pairing mechanism. The role of the dopant, in substitutional position, is unconventional in that half of the coupling parameter lambda originates in strongly localized defect-related vibrational modes, yielding a very peaked Eliashberg alpha2F(omega) function. The electron-phonon coupling potential is found to be extremely large, and T(C) is limited by the low value of the density of states at the Fermi level. The effect of boron isotope substitution is explored.