Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have created layered films of cuprate (copper-oxide) materials that allow them to localize the superconducting behavior to a single atomic plane. This discovery may pave the way for thin-film devices that have their superconducting properties tuned by electric fields.
In the experiment, Gennady Logvenov and his colleagues at Brookhaven created a bilayer film with one layer of a cuprate metal and another of a cuprate insulator. By doping the layers with zinc, which suppresses superconductivity, they were able to tell on which particular plane superconductivity was manifested, showing the importance of plane in high temperature superconductivity.
“If we could understand where the source of the high transition temperature comes from, we could possibly engineer things such that the transition temperature becomes higher,” said Elisabeth Nicol, a solid-state physicist at the University of Guelph, Canada.
The research was published in the journal Science.
[Source: physicsworld.com]
