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Register a new userEvidence of Collective Charge Behavior in the Insulating State of Ultrathin Films of Superconducting Metals
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Nonlinear I-V characteristics have been observed in insulating quench-condensed films which are locally superconducting. We suggest an interpretation in terms of the enhancement of conduction by the depinning of a Cooper pair charge density wave, Cooper pair crystal, or Cooper pair glass that may characterize the insulating regime of locally superconducting films. We propose that this is a more likely description than the Coulomb blockade or charge-anticharge unbinding phenomena.
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We report an experimental study of quench condensed ($2Kle T le 15K$) disordered ultrathin films of {rm Bi} where localisation effects and superconductivity compete. Experiments are done with different substrates and/or different underlayers. Quasi-free standing films of {rm Bi}, prepared by quenching {rm Bi} vapours onto solid {rm Xe}, are also studied. The results show a dependence of the transport properties both on the dielectric constant of the substrate/underlayer as well as the temperature of quench condensation. RHEED studies indicate that quantum size effects are important in these systems. In this paper, we try to correlate the structure of the films to the transport properties obtained.
We review our recent measurements of the complex AC conductivity of thin InO_x films studied as a function of magnetic field through the nominal 2D superconductor-insulator transition. These measurements - the first of their type to probe nonzero frequency - reveals a significant finite frequency superfluid stiffness well into the insulating regime. Unlike conventional fluctuation superconductivity in which thermal fluctuations give a superconducting response in regions of parameter space that dont exhibit long range order, these fluctuations are temperature independent as T --> 0 and are exhibited in samples where the resistance is large (greater than 10^6 Ohms/Square) and strongly diverging. We interpret this as the direct observation of quantum superconducting fluctuations around an insulating ground state. This system serves as a prototype for other insulating states of matter that derive from superconductors.
The effect of an electric field on the conductance of ultrathin films of metals deposited on substrates coated with a thin layer of amorphous Ge was investigated. A contribution to the conductance modulation symmetric with respect to the polarity of the applied electric field was found in regimes in which there was no sign of glassy behavior. For films with thicknesses that put them on the insulating side of the superconductor-insulator transition, the conductance increased with electric field, whereas for films that were becoming superconducting it decreased. Application of magnetic fields to the latter, which reduce the transition temperature and ultimately quench superconductivity, changed the sign of the reponse of the conductance to electric field back to that found for insulators. We propose that this symmetric response to capacitive charging is a consequence of changes in the conductance of the a-Ge layer, and is not a fundamental property of the physics of the superconductor-insulator transition as previously suggested.
The ingredients normally required to achieve topological superconductivity (TSC) are Cooper pairing, broken inversion symmetry, and broken time-reversal symmetry. We present a theoretical exploration of the possibility of using ultra-thin films of superconducting metals as a platform for TSC. Because they necessarily break inversion symmetry when prepared on a substrate and have intrinsic Cooper pairing, they can be TSCs when time-reversal symmetry is broken by an external magnetic field. Using microscopic density functional theory calculations we show that for ultrathin Pb and $beta$-Sn superconductors the position of the Fermi level can be tuned to quasi-2D band extrema energies using strain, and that the $g$-factors of these Bloch states can be extremely large enhancing the influence of external magnetic fields.
We investigate experimentally the electric transport at the insulating side of the superconductor to insulator transition in thin TiN-films. At temperatures T > 50 mK we observe an Arrhenius-type conductance, with an activation energy depending logarithmically on the sample size. At high bias the current voltage (I-V) characteristics display a large current jump into an electron heating dominated regime. For the largest samples, and below 50 mK we observe a low-bias power law I ~ V^alpha characteristics with an exponent alpha > 1 rapidly growing with decreasing temperature, which is expected for a binding-unbinding crossover of the charge-Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type.
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