Self-supporting superconducting replicas of pasta shapes are reported, yielding products of differing 3D architectures. Functioning high-temperature superconductor wires are developed and refined from replicas of spaghetti, demonstrating a unique sol-gel processing technique for the design and synthesis of novel macroscopic morphologies of complex functional materials.

In the fall of 2001, a group of researchers at Aoyama Gakuin University published a report in Nature on a new superconducting material, MgB2 (magnesium boride), which has a critical temperature of 39 K [1], the finding of which sent shock waves around the world. The discovery of superconductivity in Hg traces back to 1911. Since then, various metals and metal compounds have been confirmed to sh...

Control over the T(c) value of high-T(c) superconductors by self-assembled monolayers is demonstrated (T(c) = critical temperature). Molecular control was achieved by adsorption of polar molecules on the superconductor surface (see scheme) that change its carrier concentration through charge transport or light-induced polarization.

Controversy concerning the pairing symmetry of high-Tc materials has motivated an interest in those measureable properties of superconductors for which qualitative differences exist between the s-wave and d-wave cases. We report on a comparison between the microscopic electronic properties of dwave and s-wave superconductors in the mixed state. Our study is based on self-consistent numerical so...

The conditions for zero-energy Andreev surface bound states to exist are found for the lattice model of d-wave superconductor with arbitrary surface orientation. Both nearest neighbors and next nearest neighbors models are considered. It is shown that the results are very sensitive to the surface orientation. In particular, for half-filled (hl0)-surface zero-energy Andreev surface states only a...

The vision of “room-temperature superconductivity” has appeared intermittently but prominently in the literature since 1964, when W. A. Little and V. L. Ginzburg began working on the problem of high-temperature superconductivity around the same time. Since that time the prospects for room-temperature superconductivity have varied from gloom (around 1980) to glee (the years immediately after the...

We report a first-order phase transition at TM=357 K in single crystal Ca2RuO4, an isomorph to the superconductor Sr2RuO4. The discontinuous decrease in electrical resistivity signals the near d e struction of the Mott insulating phase and is triggered by a s t ructural transition from the low temperature orthorhombic to a high temperature tetragonal phase. The magnetic susceptibility, which is...

Search for Majorana fermions renewed interest in semiconductor-superconductor interfaces, while a quest for higher-order non-Abelian excitations demands formation of superconducting contacts to materials with fractionalized excitations, such as a two-dimensional electron gas in a fractional quantum Hall regime. Here we report induced superconductivity in high-mobility two-dimensional electron g...

Fluid electrolyte solutions based on mixtures of butyronitrile (PrCN) and ethyl chloride (EtC1) with Bu4NPF6 or Bu4NC104 as electrolyte freeze below -180~ and provide excellent media for cryogenic electrochemical experiments. A 1:2 mixture of PrCN and EtC1 exhibits the best combination of freezing point and ionic conductivity for ultralow temperature electrochemistry. Diffusion coefficients for...

A theory of the proximity effect in normal metal–multiband superconductor hybrid structures is formulated within the quasiclassical Green’s function formalism. The quasiclassical boundary conditions for multiband hybrid structures are derived in the dirty limit. It is shown that the existence of multiple superconducting bands manifests itself as the occurrence of additional peaks in the density...