No Arabic abstract
We followed the evolution of the normal and superconducting properties of Al thin films after each session of various successive oxygen irradiations at ambient temperature. Such irradiated films, similar to the granular ones, exhibit enhanced superconductivity, Kondo behavior and negative-curvature resistivity. Two distinct roles of oxygen are identified: as a damage-causing projectile and as an implanted oxidizing agent. The former gives rise to the processes involved in the conventional recovery stages. The latter, considered within the context of the Cabrera-Mott model, gives rise to a multistep process which involves charges transfer and creation of stabilized vacancies and charged defects. Based on the outcome of this multistep process, we consider (i) the negative curvature resistivity as a manifestation of a thermally-assisted liberation of trapped electric charges, (ii) the Kondo contribution as a spin-flip scattering from paramagnetic, color-center-type defects, and (iii) the enhancement of T_{c} as being due to a lattice softening facilitated by the stabilized defects and vacancies. The similarity in the phase diagrams of granular and irradiated films as well as the aging effects are discussed along the same line of reasoning.
The observation of superconductivity in the layered transition metal oxide NaxCoO2 y H2O (K. Takada et al., Nature 422, 53 (2003)) has caused a tremendous upsurge of scientific interest due to its similarities and its differences to the copper based high-temperature superconductors. Two years after the discovery, we report the fabrication of single-phase superconducting epitaxial thin films of Na0.3CoO2 x 1.3 D2O grown by pulsed laser deposition technique. This opens additional roads for experimental research exploring the superconducting state and the phase diagram of this unconventional material.
FeSe is a unique superconductor that can be manipulated to enhance its superconductivity using different routes while its monolayer form grown on different substrates reaches a record high temperature for a two-dimensional system. In order to understand the role played by the substrate and the reduced dimensionality on superconductivity, we examine the superconducting properties of exfoliated FeSe thin flakes by reducing the thickness from bulk down towards 9 nm. Magnetotransport measurements performed in magnetic fields up to 16T and temperatures down to 2K help to build up complete superconducting phase diagrams of different thickness flakes. While the thick flakes resemble the bulk behaviour, by reducing the thickness the superconductivity of FeSe flakes is suppressed. In the thin limit we detect signatures of a crossover towards two-dimensional behaviour from the observation of the vortex-antivortex unbinding transition and strongly enhanced anisotropy. Our study provides detailed insights into the evolution of the superconducting properties from three-dimensional bulk behaviour towards the two-dimensional limit of FeSe in the absence of a dopant substrate.
In this paper, we analyze the upper critical field of four MgB2 thin films, with different resistivity (between 5 to 50 mWcm) and critical temperature (between 29.5 to 38.8 K), measured up to 28 Tesla. In the perpendicular direction the critical fields vary from 13 to 24 T and we can estimate 42-57 T range in other direction. We observe linear temperature dependence even at low temperatures without saturation, in contrast to BCS theory. Considering the multiband nature of the superconductivity in MgB2, we conclude that two different scattering mechanisms influence separately resistivity and critical field. In this framework, resistivity values have been calculated from Hc2(T) curves and compared with the measured ones.
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to journal requirement.
The high resistivity of many bulk and film samples of MgB2 is most readily explained by the suggestion that only a fraction of the cross-sectional area of the samples is effectively carrying current. Hence the supercurrent (Jc) in such samples will be limited by the same area factor, arising for example from porosity or from insulating oxides present at the grain boundaries. We suggest that a correlation should exist, Jc ~ 1/{Rho(300K) - Rho(50K)}, where Rho(300K) - Rho(50K) is the change in the apparent resistivity from 300 K to 50 K. We report measurements of Rho(T) and Jc for a number of films made by hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition which demonstrate this correlation, although the reduced effective area argument alone is not sufficient. We suggest that this argument can also apply to many polycrystalline bulk and wire samples of MgB2.