Report on 1704.06805v1

Abstract

The quest to create superconductors with higher transition temperatures is as old as superconductivity itself.One strategy, popular after the realization that (conventional) superconductivity is mediated by phonons, is to chemically combine different elements within the crystalline unit cell to maximize the electronphonon coupling.This led to the discovery of NbTi and Nb 3 Sn, to name just the most technologically relevant examples.Here, we propose a radically different approach to transform a 'pristine' material into a better (meta-) superconductor by making use of modern fabrication techniques: designing and engineering the electronic properties of thin films via periodic patterning on the nanoscale.We present a model calculation to explore the key effects of different supercells that could be fabricated using nanofabrication or deliberate lattice mismatch, and demonstrate that specific pattern will enhance the coupling and the transition temperature.We also discuss how numerical methods could predict the correct design parameters to improve superconductivity in materials including Al, NbTi, and MgB 2 Conventional -i.e., phonon-mediated -superconductors include many elemental metals with transition temperatures between 1K and 10K, simple alloys like NbTi and Nb 3 Sn with transition temperatures up to ∼20K, and MgB 2 with a record transition temperature of 39K at ambient pressure [1].Mainly because of superior material properties that make fabrication and handling easy, these materials have widespread technological applications, ranging from medical magnetic resonance imaging to quantum information technologies.The effort to improve the quality of these conventional superconductors for applications has all but stopped with the discovery of high-temperature superconductors [2, 3, 4] (with notable exceptions [5,6,7]).Yet, any improvement of the quality of conventional superconductors has immediate and wide-ranging technological impact.Here, we present a new method for such improvement using modern nanofabrication that allows for the creation of new materials with specially designed electronic (and phononic)

Locations

• arXiv (Cornell University) - PDF