Nature of the quantum metal in a two-dimensional crystalline superconductor

By A. W. Tsen, B. Hunt, Young Duck Kim, Zhujun Yuan, S. Jia, R. Cava, James C. Hone, Philip Kim, Cory R. Dean, A. Pasupathy. Nature Physics, 2015

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Owing to electron localization, two-dimensional materials are not expected to be metallic at low temperatures, but a field-induced quantum metal phase emerges in NbSe2, whose behaviour is consistent with the Bose-metal model. Two-dimensional (2D) materials are not expected to be metals at low temperature owing to electron localization1. Consistent with this, pioneering studies on thin films reported only superconducting and insulating ground states, with a direct transition between the two as a function of disorder or magnetic field2,3,4,5,6. However, more recent works have revealed the presence of an intermediate quantum metallic state occupying a substantial region of the phase diagram7,8,9,10, whose nature is intensely debated11,12,13,14,15,16,17. Here, we observe such a state in the disorder-free limit of a crystalline 2D superconductor, produced by mechanical co-lamination of NbSe2 in an inert atmosphere. Under a small perpendicular magnetic field, we induce a transition from superconductor to the quantum metal. We find a unique power-law scaling with field in this phase, which is consistent with the Bose-metal model where metallic behaviour arises from strong phase fluctuations caused by the magnetic field11,12,13,14.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7a3cee24cb684348a8cadcc18d55a7fcecbab1a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Yong Xu
2. K. He
3. Q. Xue
4. Shoucheng Zhang
5. Xiao-Liang Qi
6. Y. Ando
7. Masatoshi Sato
8. Hsin Lin

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Yong Xu
2. K. He
3. Shoucheng Zhang
4. E. Witten
5. Masatoshi Sato

Citations in the corpus

• Superconductivity in few-layer stanene (2017, background): “Of late, the realization of highly crystalline and atomically thin superconductors has triggered a flurry of discoveries including the Griffiths singularity behavior [3], a quantum metallic phase [4,5], as well as an extremely large critical magnetic field in the plane [6,7,8].”