Electron–Phonon Coupling Constant of Uranium and Lutetium

According to the importance of electron–phonon interaction, we present an ab initio study of the electron–phonon coupling constant of two superconducting elements of periodic table. These values were calculated using density functional perturbation theory for uranium and lutetium, which are not available in the literatures. The electronic density of states peak that is around the Fermi energy and the sharp peaks in phonon dispersion curve are larger in magnitude for uranium, so the electron–phonon interaction in uranium is higher than that in lutetium. Then, we constructed a model by machine learning approach for 28 superconducting elements of the periodic table and chose the Debye and superconducting transition temperatures as descriptors features, to predict the electron–phonon coupling constants for uranium and lutetium. The absolute (relative) errors between the predicted by machine learning algorithm and density functional theory results of electron–phonon coupling constants are 0.01 (2%) and 0.13 (15%) for uranium and lutetium, respectively. This shows the power of the machine learning approach, which gives the results consistent with the density functional theory’s results.