Bosonic confinement & coherence in disordered nanodiamond arrays

November 2017

by Gufei Zhang, Tomas Samuely, Hongchu Du, Zheng Xu, Liwang Liu, Oleksandr Onufriienko, Paul W May, Johan Vanacken, Pavol Szabó, Jozef Kačmarčík, Haifeng Yuan, Peter Samuely, Rafal E Dunin-Borkowski, Johan Hofkens, and Victor V Moshchalkov

In the presence of disorder, superconductivity exhibits short-range characteristics linked to localised Cooper pairs which are responsible for anomalous phase transitions and the emergence of quantum states such as the bosonic insulating state. Complementary to well-studied homogeneously disordered superconductors, superconductor-normal hybrid arrays provide tunable realisations of the degree of granular disorder for studying anomalous quantum phase transitions. Here, we investigate the superconductor–bosonic dirty metal transition in disordered nanodiamond arrays as a function of the dispersion of intergrain spacing, which ranges from Ångströms to micrometres.

By monitoring the evolved superconducting gaps and diminished coherence peaks in the single-quasiparticle density of states, we link the destruction of the superconducting state and the emergence of bosonic dirty metallic state to breaking of the global phase coherence and persistence of the localized Cooper pairs. The observed resistive bosonic phase transitions are well modeled using a series–parallel circuit in the framework of bosonic confinement and coherence.

Further reading:

Gufei Zhang, Tomas Samuely, Hongchu Du, Zheng Xu, Liwang Liu, Oleksandr Onufriienko, Paul W May, Johan Vanacken, Pavol Szabó, Jozef Kačmarčík, Haifeng Yuan, Peter Samuely, Rafal E Dunin-Borkowski, Johan Hofkens, and Victor V Moshchalkov: Bosonic confinement and coherence in disordered nanodiamond arrays, ACS Nano 11 (2017) 11746–11754.