Phonon-Mode Specific Contributions To Room-Temperature Superconductivity In Atomic Hydrogen At High Pressures

We investigate the role of specific phonon mode symmetries for the room-temperature superconductivity in atomic hydrogen under large pressure. Using anisotropic Migdal-Eliashberg theory with ab initio input from density functional theory, we show that the E-u phonon modes are the dominant driving force for obtaining such high critical temperatures. When going from 400 to 600 GPa, we find an increased transition temperature; however, the total electron-phonon coupling strength is counterintuitively reduced. Our analysis reveals that this is due to an enhanced contribution to the coupling strength by the E-u phonon mode. We furthermore compute the momentum anisotropy of the superconducting gap which we find to be relatively small, about 7% of the mean gap value at 100 K.