Tag Archives: superconductor

Electron quantum materials, a new field in nanotechnology?

Physicists name and codify new field in nanotechnology: ‘electron quantum metamaterials’

UC Riverside’s Nathaniel Gabor and colleague formulate a vision for the field in a perspective article

Courtesy: University of California at Riverside

Bravo to whomever put the image of a field together together with a subhead that includes the phrases ‘vision for a field’ and ‘perspective article’. It’s even better if you go to the November 5, 2018 University of California at Riverside (UCR) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Iqbal Pittalwala to see the original format,

When two atomically thin two-dimensional layers are stacked on top of each other and one layer is made to rotate against the second layer, they begin to produce patterns — the familiar moiré patterns — that neither layer can generate on its own and that facilitate the passage of light and electrons, allowing for materials that exhibit unusual phenomena. For example, when two graphene layers are overlaid and the angle between them is 1.1 degrees, the material becomes a superconductor.

“It’s a bit like driving past a vineyard and looking out the window at the vineyard rows. Every now and then, you see no rows because you’re looking directly along a row,” said Nathaniel Gabor, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside. “This is akin to what happens when two atomic layers are stacked on top of each other. At certain angles of twist, everything is energetically allowed. It adds up just right to allow for interesting possibilities of energy transfer.”

This is the future of new materials being synthesized by twisting and stacking atomically thin layers, and is still in the “alchemy” stage, Gabor added. To bring it all under one roof, he and physicist Justin C. W. Song of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have proposed this field of research be called “electron quantum metamaterials” and have just published a perspective article in Nature Nanotechnology.

“We highlight the potential of engineering synthetic periodic arrays with feature sizes below the wavelength of an electron. Such engineering allows the electrons to be manipulated in unusual ways, resulting in a new range of synthetic quantum metamaterials with unconventional responses,” Gabor said.

Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties that do not occur naturally. Examples include optical cloaking devices and super-lenses akin to the Fresnel lens that lighthouses use. Nature, too, has adopted such techniques – for example, in the unique coloring of butterfly wings – to manipulate photons as they move through nanoscale structures.

“Unlike photons that scarcely interact with each other, however, electrons in subwavelength structured metamaterials are charged, and they strongly interact,” Gabor said. “The result is an enormous variety of emergent phenomena and radically new classes of interacting quantum metamaterials.”

Gabor and Song were invited by Nature Nanotechnology to write a review paper. But the pair chose to delve deeper and lay out the fundamental physics that may explain much of the research in electron quantum metamaterials. They wrote a perspective paper instead that envisions the current status of the field and discusses its future.

“Researchers, including in our own labs, were exploring a variety of metamaterials but no one had given the field even a name,” said Gabor, who directs the Quantum Materials Optoelectronics lab at UCR. “That was our intent in writing the perspective. We are the first to codify the underlying physics. In a way, we are expressing the periodic table of this new and exciting field. It has been a herculean task to codify all the work that has been done so far and to present a unifying picture. The ideas and experiments have matured, and the literature shows there has been rapid progress in creating quantum materials for electrons. It was time to rein it all in under one umbrella and offer a road map to researchers for categorizing future work.”

In the perspective, Gabor and Song collect early examples in electron metamaterials and distil emerging design strategies for electronic control from them. They write that one of the most promising aspects of the new field occurs when electrons in subwavelength-structure samples interact to exhibit unexpected emergent behavior.

“The behavior of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene that emerged was a surprise,” Gabor said. “It shows, remarkably, how electron interactions and subwavelength features could be made to work together in quantum metamaterials to produce radically new phenomena. It is examples like this that paint an exciting future for electronic metamaterials. Thus far, we have only set the stage for a lot of new work to come.”

Gabor, a recipient of a Cottrell Scholar Award and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Global Scholar Award, was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program and a National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research CAREER award.

There is a video illustrating the ideas which is embedded in a November 5, 2018 news item on phys.oirg,


Here’s a link to and a citation for the ‘perspective’ paper,

Electron quantum metamaterials in van der Waals heterostructures by Justin C. W. Song & Nathaniel M. Gabor. Nature Nanotechnology, volume 13, pages986–993 (2018) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0294-9 Published: 05 November 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Ultra-thin superconducting film for outer space

Truth in a press release? But first, there’s this April 6, 2017 news item on Nanowerk announcing research that may have applications in aerospace and other sectors,

Experimental physicists in the research group led by Professor Uwe Hartmann at Saarland University have developed a thin nanomaterial with superconducting properties. Below about -200 °C these materials conduct electricity without loss, levitate magnets and can screen magnetic fields.

The particularly interesting aspect of this work is that the research team has succeeded in creating superconducting nanowires that can be woven into an ultra-thin film that is as flexible as cling film. As a result, novel coatings for applications ranging from aerospace to medical technology are becoming possible.

The research team will be exhibiting their superconducting film at Hannover Messe from April 24th to April 28th [2017] (Hall 2, Stand B46) and are looking for commercial and industrial partners with whom they can develop their system for practical applications.

An April 6, 2017 University of Saarland press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more details along with a line that rings with the truth,

A team of experimental physicists at Saarland University have developed something that – it has to be said – seems pretty unremarkable at first sight. [emphasis mine] It looks like nothing more than a charred black piece of paper. But appearances can be deceiving. This unassuming object is a superconductor. The term ‘superconductor’ is given to a material that (usually at a very low temperatures) has zero electrical resistance and can therefore conduct an electric current without loss. Put simply, the electrons in the material can flow unrestricted through the cold immobilized atomic lattice. In the absence of electrical resistance, if a magnet is brought up close to a cold superconductor, the magnet effectively ‘sees’ a mirror image of itself in the superconducting material. So if a superconductor and a magnet are placed in close proximity to one another and cooled with liquid nitrogen they will repel each another and the magnet levitates above the superconductor. The term ‘levitation’ comes from the Latin word levitas meaning lightness. It’s a bit like a low-temperature version of the hoverboard from the ‘Back to the Future’ films. If the temperature is too high, however, frictionless sliding is just not going to happen.
Many of the common superconducting materials available today are rigid, brittle and dense, which makes them heavy. The Saarbrücken physicists have now succeeded in packing superconducting properties into a thin flexible film. The material is a essentially a woven fabric of plastic fibres and high-temperature superconducting nanowires. ‘That makes the material very pliable and adaptable – like cling film (or ‘plastic wrap’ as it’s also known). Theoretically, the material can be made to any size. And we need fewer resources than are typically required to make superconducting ceramics, so our superconducting mesh is also cheaper to fabricate,’ explains Uwe Hartmann, Professor of Nanostructure Research and Nanotechnology at Saarland University.

The low weight of the film is particularly advantageous. ‘With a density of only 0.05 grams per cubic centimetre, the material is very light, weighing about a hundred times less than a conventional superconductor. This makes the material very promising for all those applications where weight is an issue, such as in space technology. There are also potential applications in medical technology,’ explains Hartmann. The material could be used as a novel coating to provide low-temperature screening from electromagnetic fields, or it could be used in flexible cables or to facilitate friction-free motion.

In order to be able to weave this new material, the experimental physicists made use of a technique known as electrospinning, which is usually used in the manufacture of polymeric fibres. ‘We force a liquid material through a very fine nozzle known as a spinneret to which a high electrical voltage has been applied. This produces nanowire filaments that are a thousand times thinner than the diameter of a human hair, typically about 300 nanometres or less. We then heat the mesh of fibres so that superconductors of the right composition are created. The superconducting material itself is typically an yttrium-barium-copper-oxide or similar compound,’ explains Dr. Michael Koblischka, one of the research scientists in Hartmann‘s group.

The research project received €100,000 in funding from the Volkswagen Foundation as part of its ‘Experiment!’ initiative. The initiative aims to encourage curiosity-driven, blue-skies research. The positive results from the Saarbrücken research team demonstrate the value of this type of funding. Since September 2016, the project has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Total funds of around €425,000 will be provided over a three-year period during which the research team will be carrying out more detailed investigations into the properties of the nanowires.

I’d say the “unremarkable but appearances can be deceiving” comments are true more often than not. I think that’s one of the hard things about science. Big advances can look nondescript.

What looks like a pretty unremarkable piece of burnt paper is in fact an ultrathin superconductor that has been developed by the team lead by Uwe Hartmann (r.) shown here with doctoral student XianLin Zeng. Courtesy: Saarland University

In any event, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Preparation of granular Bi-2212 nanowires by electrospinning by Xian Lin Zeng, Michael R Koblischka, Thomas Karwoth, Thomas Hauet, and Uwe Hartmann. Superconductor Science and Technology, Volume 30, Number 3 Published 1 February 2017

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd

This paper is behind a paywall.

2-D boron as a superconductor

A March 31, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily highlights some research into 2D (two-dimensional) boron at Rice University (Texas, US),

Rice University scientists have determined that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. In fact, it may be the only 2-D material with such potential.

Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his co-workers published their calculations that show atomically flat boron is metallic and will transmit electrons with no resistance. …

The hitch, as with most superconducting materials, is that it loses its resistivity only when very cold, in this case between 10 and 20 kelvins (roughly, minus-430 degrees Fahrenheit). But for making very small superconducting circuits, it might be the only game in town.

A March 30, 2016 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert but dated March 31, 2016), which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

The basic phenomenon of superconductivity has been known for more than 100 years, said Evgeni Penev, a research scientist in the Yakobson group, but had not been tested for its presence in atomically flat boron.

“It’s well-known that the material is pretty light because the atomic mass is small,” Penev said. “If it’s metallic too, these are two major prerequisites for superconductivity. That means at low temperatures, electrons can pair up in a kind of dance in the crystal.”

“Lower dimensionality is also helpful,” Yakobson said. “It may be the only, or one of very few, two-dimensional metals. So there are three factors that gave the initial motivation for us to pursue the research. Then we just got more and more excited as we got into it.”

Electrons with opposite momenta and spins effectively become Cooper pairs; they attract each other at low temperatures with the help of lattice vibrations, the so-called “phonons,” and give the material its superconducting properties, Penev said. “Superconductivity becomes a manifestation of the macroscopic wave function that describes the whole sample. It’s an amazing phenomenon,” he said.

It wasn’t entirely by chance that the first theoretical paper establishing conductivity in a 2-D material appeared at roughly the same time the first samples of the material were made by laboratories in the United States and China. In fact, an earlier paper by the Yakobson group had offered a road map for doing so.

That 2-D boron has now been produced is a good thing, according to Yakobson and lead authors Penev and Alex Kutana, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice. “We’ve been working to characterize boron for years, from cage clusters to nanotubes to planer sheets, but the fact that these papers appeared so close together means these labs can now test our theories,” Yakobson said.

“In principle, this work could have been done three years ago as well,” he said. “So why didn’t we? Because the material remained hypothetical; okay, theoretically possible, but we didn’t have a good reason to carry it too far.

“But then last fall it became clear from professional meetings and interactions that it can be made. Now those papers are published. When you think it’s coming for real, the next level of exploration becomes more justifiable,” Yakobson said.

Boron atoms can make more than one pattern when coming together as a 2-D material, another characteristic predicted by Yakobson and his team that has now come to fruition. These patterns, known as polymorphs, may allow researchers to tune the material’s conductivity “just by picking a selective arrangement of the hexagonal holes,” Penev said.

He also noted boron’s qualities were hinted at when researchers discovered more than a decade ago that magnesium diborite is a high-temperature electron-phonon superconductor. “People realized a long time ago the superconductivity is due to the boron layer,” Penev said. “The magnesium acts to dope the material by spilling some electrons into the boron layer. In this case, we don’t need them because the 2-D boron is already metallic.”

Penev suggested that isolating 2-D boron between layers of inert hexagonal boron nitride (aka “white graphene”) might help stabilize its superconducting nature.

Without the availability of a block of time on several large government supercomputers, the study would have taken a lot longer, Yakobson said. “Alex did the heavy lifting on the computational work,” he said. “To turn it from a lunchtime discussion into a real quantitative research result took a very big effort.”

The paper is the first by Yakobson’s group on the topic of superconductivity, though Penev is a published author on the subject. “I started working on superconductivity in 1993, but it was always kind of a hobby, and I hadn’t done anything on the topic in 10 years,” Penev said. “So this paper brings it full circle.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Can Two-Dimensional Boron Superconduct? by Evgeni S. Penev, Alex Kutana, and Boris I. Yakobson. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b00070 Publication Date (Web): March 22, 2016

Copyright © 2016 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Dexter Johnson has published an April 5, 2016 post on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) about this latest Rice University work on 2D boron that includes comments from his email interview with Penev.

Extreme graphene—University of British Columbia (Canada) researchers* create first superconducting graphene

There haven’t been too many announcements about Canadian research into graphene so it was nice to receive a news release about a first in the field achieved by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada). From a Sept. 4, 2015 UBC news announcement (also on EurekAlert)*,

Graphene, the ultra-thin, ultra-strong material made from a single layer of carbon atoms, just got a little more extreme. UBC physicists have been able to create the first ever superconducting graphene sample by coating it with lithium atoms.

Although superconductivity has already been observed in intercalated bulk graphite—three-dimensional crystals layered with alkali metal atoms, based on the graphite used in pencils—inducing superconductivity in single-layer graphene has until now eluded scientists.

“This first experimental realization of superconductivity in graphene promises to usher us in a new era of graphene electronics and nanoscale quantum devices,” says Andrea Damascelli, director of UBC’s Quantum Matter Institute and leading scientist of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] study outlining the discovery.

Graphene, roughly 200 times stronger than steel by weight, is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Along with studying its extreme physical properties, scientists eventually hope to make very fast transistors, semiconductors, sensors and transparent electrodes using graphene.

“This is an amazing material,’” says Bart Ludbrook, first author on the PNAS paper and a former PhD researcher in Damascelli’s group at UBC. “Decorating monolayer graphene with a layer of lithium atoms enhances the graphene’s electron–phonon coupling to the point where superconductivity can be stabilized.”

Given the massive scientific and technological interest, the ability to induce superconductivity in single-layer graphene promises to have significant cross-disciplinary impacts. According to financial reports, the global market for graphene reached $9 million in 2014 with most sales in the semiconductor, electronics, battery, energy, and composites industries.

The researchers, which include colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research through the joint Max-Planck-UBC Centre for Quantum Materials, prepared the lithium-decorated graphene in ultra-high vacuum conditions and at ultra-low temperatures (-267 degrees Celsius or 5 Kelvin), to achieve this breakthrough.

UBC’s Quantum Matter Institute

UBC’s Quantum Matter Institute (QMI) is internationally recognized for its research and discoveries in quantum structures, quantum materials, and applications towards quantum devices. A recent $66.5-million investment from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund will broaden the scope of QMI’s research and support the discovery of practical applications for computing, electronics, medicine and sustainable energy technologies.

Last May (2015), Dr. Damascelli recorded an interview as part of the Research2Reality, a Canadian science media engagement project, where he discusses his work with graphene superconductors and notes the team had just managed a successful test of the new material,

You can find an early version of the researchers’ paper here,

Evidence for superconductivity in Li-decorated monolayer graphene by Bart Ludbrook, Giorgio Levy, Pascal Nigge, Marta Zonno, Michael Schneider, David Dvorak, Christian Veenstra, Sergey Zhdanovich, Douglas Wong, Pinder Dosanjh, Carola Straßer, Alexander Stohr, Stiven Forti, Christian Ast, Ulrich Starke, and Andrea Damascelli. arXiv.org > cond-mat > arXiv:1508.05925 (Submitted on 24 Aug 2015 (v1), last revised 29 Aug 2015 (this version, v2))

This is open access.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Evidence for superconductivity in Li-decorated monolayer graphene by B. M. Ludbrook. G. Levy, P. Nigge, M. Zonno, M. Schneider, D. J. Dvorak, C. N. Veenstra, S. Zhdanovich, D. Wong, P. Dosanjh, C. Straßer, A. Stöhr, S. Forti, C. R. Ast, U. Starke, and A. Damascelli. PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1510435112

You can find out more about about Research2Reality here in a May 11, 2015 posting where it was first featured.

*’researchers’ added to head and EurekAlert link added to post on Sept. 9, 2015.