Related papers: Possible superconductivity in very thin magnesium …
It is common knowledge that noble metals are excellent conductors but do not exhibit superconductivity. On the other hand, quantum confinement in thin films has been consistently shown to induce a significant enhancement of the…
Elemental good metals, including noble metals (Cu, Ag, Au) and several $s$-block elements, do not exhibit superconductivity in bulk at ambient pressure, mainly due to weak electron-phonon coupling that cannot overcome Coulomb repulsion.…
We present an analytically solvable theory of BCS-type superconductivity in good metals which are confined along one of the three spatial directions, such as thin films. Closed-form expressions for the dependence of the superconducting…
Superconductivity is inevitably suppressed in reduced dimensionality. Questions of how thin superconducting wires or films can be before they lose their superconducting properties have important technological ramifications and go to the…
All non-interacting two-dimensional electronic systems are expected to exhibit an insulating ground state. This conspicuous absence of the metallic phase has been challenged only in the case of low-disorder, low density, semiconducting…
The discovery of superconductivity at 39 K in magnesium diboride offers the possibility of a new class of low-cost, high-performance superconducting materials for magnets and electronic applications. With twice the critical temperature of…
Supercurrent field-effect transistors made from thin metallic films are a promising option for next-generation high-performance computation platforms. Despite extensive research, there is still no complete quantitative microscopic…
Thin films of $ \beta- $tungsten host superconductivity in the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling. This non-equilibrium crystalline phase of tungsten has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its giant spin Hall effect…
Metal mixed polymers are a cheap and effective way to produce flexible metals and superconductors. As part of an on-going effort to learn how to tune the properties of these systems with ion implantation, we present a study of the…
A central challenge in nanoscale superconductivity is to understand and exploit the combined action of quantum confinement and proximity effects in experimentally realistic metallic heterostructures. We theoretically investigate…
We develop a Ginzburg--Landau theory for superconducting thin films under quantum confinement. Starting from the microscopic BCS free energy and the recently developed confinement theory of metallic thin films, explicit analytical…
We develop the multi-band BCS model of superconductivity in the ultrathin films using the orthogonal tight-binding approximation for constructing the electron wavefunctions. This allows for relatively simple determination of the band…
The supercurrent field effect is experimentally realized in various nano-scale devices, based on the superconductivity suppression by external electric fields being effective for confined systems. In spite of intense research, a microscopic…
The miniaturization of electronic devices has led to the prominence, in technological applications, of ultra-thin films with a thickness ranging from a few tens of nanometers to just about 1-2 nanometers. While these materials are still…
Superconducting thin metallic films, functioning as supercurrent gate-tunable transistors, have considerable potential for future quantum electronic devices. Despite extensive research, a comprehensive microscopic quantitative mechanism…
Superconductivity in granular films is controlled by the grain size and the inter-grain coupling. In a two-component granular system formed by a random mixture of a normal metal (N) and a superconductor (S), the superconducting nano-grains…
Due to competing long range ferromagnetic order, the transition metals Fe, Co and Ni are not superconductors at ambient pressure. While superconductivity was observed in a non-magnetic phase of Fe, stabilized under pressure, it is yet to be…
Progress in superconducting device and detector technologies over the past decade have realized practical applications in quantum computers, detectors for far-infrared telescopes, and optical communications. Superconducting thin film…
The thermal properties of solids under nanoscale confinement are currently not understood at the atomic level. Recent numerical studies have highlighted the presence of a minimum in the thermal conductivity as a function of thickness for…
The density functional theory for superconductors developed in the preceding article [cond-mat/0408685] is applied to the calculation of superconducting properties of several elemental metals. In particular, we present results for the…