High-temperature superconductor goes super thin

Published in Physics World, 2 Nov 2009

Physicists in the US have created the world’s thinnest high-temperature superconductor, demonstrating that the phenomenon can exist over a thickness of a few atoms.

Gennady Logvenov and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, have created layered films of copper-oxide or “cuprate” materials and have discovered that they can localize the superconducting behaviour to a single atomic plane. They say that the discovery will help theorists to build more comprehensive models of high-temperature superconductivity, and lead to thin-film devices that have their superconducting properties tuned by electric fields. […]

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