At ambient pressure, BiTeI is the first material found to exhibit a giant
Rashba splitting of the bulk electronic bands. At low pressures, BiTeI
undergoes a transition from trivial insulator to topological insulator. At
still higher pressures, two structural transitions are known to occur. We have
carried out a series of electrical resistivity and AC magnetic susceptibility
measurements on BiTeI at pressure up to ~40 GPa in an effort to characterize
the properties of the high-pressure phases. A previous calculation found that
the high-pressure orthorhombic P4/nmm structure BiTeI is a metal. We find that
this structure is superconducting with Tc values as high as 6 K. AC magnetic
susceptibility measurements support the bulk nature of the superconductivity.
Using electronic structure and phonon calculations, we compute Tc and find that
our data is consistent with phonon-mediated superconductivity.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure
