No Arabic abstract
We report Meissner effect for type-II superconductors with a maximum Tc of 19 K, which is the highest value among those in new-carbon related superconductors, found in the honeycomb arrays of multi-walled CNTs (MWNTs). Drastic reduction of ferromagnetic catalyst and efficient growth of MWNTs by deoxidization of catalyst make the finding possible. The weak magnetic anisotropy, superconductive coherence length (- 7 nm), and disappearance of the Meissner effect after dissolving array structure indicate that the graphite structure of an MWNT and those intertube coupling in the honeycomb array are dominant factors for the mechanism.
We report that entirely end-bonded multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) can show superconductivity with the transition temperature Tc as high as 12K that is approximately 40-times larger than those reported in ropes of single-walled nanotubes. We find that emergence of this superconductivity is very sensitive to junction structures of Au electrode/MWNTs. This reveals that only MWNTs with optimal numbers of electrically activated shells, which are realized by the end-bonding, can allow the superconductivity due to inter shell effects.
We report clear observations of the magnetic Meissner effect in arrays of superconducting 4 {AA} carbon nanotubes grown in the linear channels of AlPO4-5 (AFI) zeolite single crystals. Both bulk magnetization and magnetic torque experiments show a clear signature of the lower critical Hc1 transition, a pronounced difference in zero-field cooled and field cooled branches during temperature sweeps below 6K, and signatures of 1D superconducting fluctuations below ~15-18 K. These experiments extend the magnetic phase diagram we obtained previously by resistive experiments [Z. Wang et al., Phys. Rev. B 81, 174530 (2010)] towards low magnetic fields and within the range of zero resistance.
Recent experimental and theoretical results on intrinsic superconductivity in ropes of single-wall carbon nanotubes are reviewed and compared. We find strong experimental evidence for superconductivity when the distance between the normal electrodes is large enough. This indicates the presence of attractive phonon-mediated interactions in carbon nanotubes, which can even overcome the repulsive Coulomb interactions. The effective low-energy theory of rope superconductivity explains the experimental results on the temperature-dependent resistance below the transition temperature in terms of quantum phase slips. Quantitative agreement with only one fit parameter can be obtained. Nanotube ropes thus represent superconductors in an extreme 1D limit never explored before.
We show that carbon nanotubes (CNT) are good candidates for realizing one-dimensional topological superconductivity with Majorana fermions localized near the end points. The physics behind topological superconductivity in CNT is novel and is mediated by a recently reported curvature-induced spin-orbit coupling which itself has a topological origin. In addition to the spin-orbit coupling, an important new requirement for a robust topological state is broken chirality symmetry about the nanotube axis. We use topological arguments to show that, for recently realized strengths of spin-orbit coupling and broken chirality symmetry, a robust topological gap of around 500 mK is achievable in carbon nanotubes.
The low-energy theory for multi-wall carbon nanotubes including the long-ranged Coulomb interactions, internal screening effects, and single-electron hopping between graphite shells is derived and analyzed by bosonization methods. Characteristic Luttinger liquid power laws are found for the tunneling density of states, with exponents approaching their Fermi liquid value only very slowly as the number of conducting shells increases. With minor modifications, the same conclusions apply to transport in ropes of single-wall nanotubes.