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Tunneling spectroscopy of gate-induced superconductivity in MoS$_2$

Superconductivity 2018-06-11 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Materials Science

Abstract

The ability to gate-induce superconductivity by electrostatic charge accumulation is a recent breakthrough in physics and nano-electronics. With the exception of LaAlO3_3/SrTiO3_3 interfaces, experiments on gate-induced superconductors have been largely confined to resistance measurements, which provide very limited information about the superconducting state. Here, we explore gate-induced superconductivity in MoS2_2 by performing tunneling spectroscopy to determine the energy-dependent density of states (DOS) for different levels of electron density n\textit{n}. In the superconducting state, the DOS is strongly suppressed at energy smaller than the gap, \Delta, which is maximum (\Delta ~ 2 meV) for n\textit{n} of ~ 1014^{14} cm2^{-2} and decreases monotonously for larger n\textit{n}. A perpendicular magnetic field B\textit{B} generates states at E<ΔE<\Delta that fill the gap, but a 20% DOS suppression of superconducting origin unexpectedly persists much above the transport critical field. Conversely, an in-plane field up to 10 T leaves the DOS entirely unchanged. Our measurements exclude that the superconducting state in MoS2_2 is fully gapped and reveal the presence of a DOS that vanishes linearly with energy, the explanation of which requires going beyond a conventional, purely phonon-driven Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer mechanism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1806.03222,
  title  = {Tunneling spectroscopy of gate-induced superconductivity in MoS$_2$},
  author = {Davide Costanzo and Haijing Zhang and Bojja Aditya Reddy and Helmuth Berger and Alberto F. Morpurgo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.03222},
  year   = {2018}
}