Metamaterial superconductors

Abstract

Searching for natural materials exhibiting larger electron-electron interactionsconstitutes a traditional approach to high temperature superconductivity research.Very recently we pointed out that the newly developed field of electromagnetic metamaterials deals with the somewhat related task of dielectric response engineering on a sub-100 nm scale. Considerable enhancement of the electronelectron interaction may be expected in such metamaterial scenarios as in epsilon near zero (ENZ) and hyperbolic metamaterials. In both cases dielectric function may become small and negative in substantial portions of the relevant fourmomentum space, leading to enhancement of the electron pairing interaction. This approach has been verified in experiments with aluminium-based metamaterials. Metamaterial superconductor with Tc = 3.9 K have been fabricated, that is three times that of pure aluminium (Tc = 1.2 K), which opens up new possibilities to considerably improve Tc of other simple superconductors. Taking advantage of the demonstrated success of this approach, the critical temperature of hypothetic niobium, MgB2 and H 2 S-based metamaterial superconductors is evaluated. The MgB 2 -based metamaterial superconductors are projected to reach the liquid nitrogen temperature range. In the case of an H 2 S-based metamaterial projected Tc appears to reach ~250 K.

Theoretical modeling of critical temperature increase in metamaterial superconductors

“…Compared to the bulk metal, zeroes of the effective dielectric response function  eff (q,) of the metal-dielectric metamaterial are observed at shifted positions compared to the zeroes of  m (q,) [2], and additional zeros may also appear. According to the Maxwell-Garnett approximation [11], mixing of nanoparticles of a superconducting "matrix" with dielectric "inclusions" (described by the dielectric constants  m and  d , respectively) results in the effective medium with a dielectric constant  eff , which may be obtained as…”

“…Our recent theoretical [1,2] and experimental [3,4] work demonstrated that many tools developed in electromagnetic metamaterial research may be successfully used to engineer artificial metamaterial superconductors having considerably improved superconducting properties. This deep and non-trivial connection between the fields of electromagnetic metamaterials and superconductivity research stems from the fact that superconducting properties of a material, such as electron-electron pairing interaction, the superconducting critical temperature T c , etc.…”

Plasmonic Metasensors Based on 2D Hybrid Atomically Thin Perovskite Nanomaterials

“…Here, we can obtain the dielectric constant for the periodical array structures respectively for the metasurfaces along the transverse (ε ⊥ ) and longitudinal directions (ε ), as below: (12) where N = 1 -W m /P m is the plasmonic concentration for the metallic nanomaterials inside the structures, and W m and P m are widths and periodicity of the metasurface nanostructure. This equation is applicable for both metal array and groove designs [68]. In addition to the TMM approach, we also employed the Lumerical Finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) solutions to carry out the numerical analyses on the electric field distribution under the resonance conditions.…”

Cooper pairs localization in tree-like networks of superconducting islands

“…Extensive application of this procedure led to the discovery of high critical temperature (HTC) superconductors 11 and the impact of this success has fueled the dream of finding a room-temperature superconductor for a long time. Recently, it has been proposed that dielectric metamaterials can be used to create effective media in which the electron-electron effective interaction (depending on the inverse of the dielectric function) can be enhanced 12,13 . The enhancement of the interaction between electrons requires the ability of engineering the dielectric function of an artificially designed system.…”