On the Josephson effect between superconductors in singlet and triplet spin-pairing states

An expression is derived for the Josephson current between two weakly coupled superconductors of which one or both have pairs in a spin-triplet state. It is shown that there can be no Josephson effect up to second order in the transition matrix elements between a superconductor with spin-triplet pairs and one with spin-singlet pairs if the coupling between the two superconductors can be described with a spin-conserving tunnel hamiltonian. This is shown to offer a possibility to investigate experimentally whether a particular superconductor has spin-triplet pairs by coupling it weakly to a well-known spin-singlet pairing superconductor.     

单线态分裂的超快光谱学研究

有机分子中的单线态分裂过程能将单个光激发的单线态激子转化成两个三线态激子. 借助此载流子倍增效应, 太阳能电池可以更有效地利用太阳光谱中的高能光子, 进而突破单结太阳能电池效率的理论极限. 因此, 单线态分裂备受关注. 本文回顾学术界对单线态分裂物理图像的认识以及争议, 结合课题组近年来的一些结果, 重点总结此领域中运用瞬态光谱学方法取得的实验进展, 讨论有关多激子中间暗态机理的不同观点, 并介绍单线态分裂材料的发展以及器件应用.     

Charge radii and magnetic moments of odd- A 183-189Pb isotopes

Unexpected features of the BaBar data on e ⁺ e ^- $ \rightarrow$ B $ \overline{{B}}$ cross-sections (B stands for baryon) are discussed. These data have been collected, with unprecedented accuracy, by means of the initial-state radiation technique, which is particularly suitable in giving good acceptance and energy resolution at threshold. A striking feature observed in the BaBar data is the non-vanishing cross-section at threshold for all these processes. This is the expectation due to the Coulomb enhancement factor acting on a charged fermion pair. In the case of e ⁺ e ^- $ \rightarrow$ p $ \overline{{p}}$ it is found that Coulomb final-state interactions largely dominate the cross-section and the form factor is | G ^p(4M ² _p)| ～ 1 , which could be a general feature for baryons. In the case of neutral baryons an interpretation of the non-vanishing cross-section at threshold is suggested, based on quark electromagnetic interaction and taking into account the asymmetry between attractive and repulsive Coulomb factors. Besides strange baryon cross-sections are compared to U -spin invariance predictions.     

Ginzburg-Landau equations for anisotropic superconductors

We use the framework of a general quasiclassical theory of superconductivity which allows for arbitrary gap and Fermi surface anisotropy and for impurity scattering in Born approximation. We derive general Ginzburg-Landau integro-differential equations, which comprise all previous limiting cases considered in the literature. From these equations more specialized Ginzburg-Landau equations may easily be derived.     

Dry-etching processes for high-temperature superconductors

Patterning of thin films and multilevel structures of high-temperature superconductors is a key technology for microelectronic applications. We performed a comparative study of Ion Beam Etching (IBE) and Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) processes for YBa₂Cu₃O_7−δ thin films. The RIE process with a pure chlorine plasma yielded small etching rates, caused by chemical modifications of the sample surface which result in a passivation layer reducing the chemical etching rate. Using IBE, microstructures down to the 1 μm regime could be fabricated without reducing the critical temperature T_c and the critical current density J_c of the material. Etching rates up to 40 nm/min could be achieved without deteriorating the properties of the superconducting film by cooling the sample effectively during the etching process. The influence of the etching process on J_c was investigated by imaging the spatial distribution of the critical current along the patterned microstructures using Low-Temperature Scanning Electron Microscopy (LTSEM).     

Alloy model for high-temperature superconductors

An alloy model is proposed for the electronic structure of high-temperature superconductors. It is based on the assumption that holes and extra electrons are localized in small copper-oxygen clusters, that would be the components of such an alloy. This model, when used together with quantum chemical calculations on small clusters, can explain the structure observed in the experimental densities of states of both hole and electron superconductors close to the Fermi energy. The main point is the strong dependence of the energy level distribution and composition on the number of electrons in a cluster. The alloy model also suggests a way to correlate T_c with the number of holes, or extra electrons, and the number of adequate clusters to locate them.     

Spin singlet mott states and evidence for spin singlet quantum condensates of spin-one bosons in lattices

We have investigated spin singlet Mott states of spin-one bosons with antiferromagnetic interactions. These spin singlet states do not break rotational symmetry and exhibit remarkably different macroscopic properties compared with nematic Mott states of spin-one bosons. We demonstrate that the dynamics of spin singlet Mott states is fully characterized by even- or odd-class quantum dimer models. The difference between spin singlet Mott states for even and odd numbers of atoms per site can be attributed to a selection rule in the low energy sectors of on-site Hilbert spaces; alternatively, it can also be attributed to an effect of Berry’s phases on bosonic Mott states. We also discuss evidence for spin singlet quantum condensate of spin-one atoms. Our main finding is that in a projected spin singlet Hilbert space, the low energy physics of spin-one bosons is equivalent to that of a Bose-Hubbard model for spinless bosons interacting via Ising gauge fields. The other major finding is spin-charge separation in some one-dimensional Mott states. We propose charge-e spin singlet superfluid for an odd number of atoms per lattice site and charge-2e spin singlet superfluid for an even number of atoms per lattice site in one-dimensional lattices. All discussions in this article are limited to integer numbers of bosons per site.     

Common phase diagram for low-dimensional superconductors

A phenomenological phase diagram which has been derived for high-temperature superconductors from NMR Knight-shift measurements of the pseudogap is compared to the phase diagram that is obtained for organic superconductors and spin-ladder superconductors, both low-dimensional systems. This is contrasted to the phase diagram of some Heavy Fermion superconductors, i.e. superconductors not constrained to a low dimensionality.     

Extended Ginzburg-Landau formalism for two-band superconductors

Recent observation of unusual vortex patterns in MgB(2) single crystals raised speculations about possible "type-1.5" superconductivity in two-band materials, mixing the properties of both type-I and type-II superconductors. However, the strict application of the standard two-band Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory results in simply proportional order parameters of the two bands-and does not support the "type-1.5" behavior. Here we derive the extended GL formalism (accounting all terms of the next order over the small τ=1-T/T(c) parameter) for a two-band clean s-wave superconductor and show that the two condensates generally have different spatial scales, with the difference disappearing only in the limit T→T(c). The extended version of the two-band GL formalism improves the validity of GL theory below T(c) and suggests revisiting the earlier calculations based on the standard model.     

New omega vortex identification method

A new vortex identification criterion called W-method is proposed based on the ideas that vorticity overtakes deformation in vortex.The comparison with other vortex identification methods like Q-criterion and λ_2-method is conducted and the advantages of the new method can be summarized as follows:(1) the method is able to capture vortex well and very easy to perform;(2) the physical meaning of W is clear while the interpretations of iso-surface values of Q and λ_2 chosen to visualize vortices are obscure;(3)being different from Q and λ_2 iso-surface visualization which requires wildly various thresholds to capture the vortex structure properly, W is pretty universal and does not need much adjustment in different cases and the iso-surfaces of W=0.52 can always capture the vortices properly in all the cases at different time steps, which we investigated;(4) both strong and weak vortices can be captured well simultaneously while improper Q and λ_2 threshold may lead to strong vortex capture while weak vortices are lost or weak vortices are captured but strong vortices are smeared;(5) W=0.52 is a quantity to approximately define the vortex boundary. Note that, to calculate W, the length and velocity must be used in the non-dimensional form. From our direct numerical simulation, it is found that the vorticity direction is very different from the vortex rotation direction in general 3-D vortical flow,the Helmholtz velocity decomposition is reviewed and vorticity is proposed to be further decomposed to vortical vorticity and non-vortical vorticity.     

Criteria for London-type behavior in superconductors

Summation of a renormalized series over an energy band is used to construct equations for a London superconductor; the criterion is found to be complied with either if the temperature is close to the critical temperature T_c or if the correlation length is small by comparison with the size of a free pair. Equations applicable for any temperature, including T = 0, are derived for the latter case; they are more nonlinear than the Ginzburg-Landau ones. The spectrum of single-particle excitations is derived for the inhomogeneous case.     

Keldysh proximity action for disordered superconductors

We review a novel approach to the superconductive proximity effect in disordered normal-superconducting (N-S) structures. The method is based on the multicharge Keldysh action and is suitable for the treatment of interaction and fluctuation effects. As an application of the formalism, we study the subgap conductance and noise in two-dimensional N-S systems in the presence of the electron-electron interaction in the Cooper channel. It is shown that singular nature of the interaction correction at large scales leads to a nonmonotonuos temperature, voltage and magnetic field dependence of the Andreev conductance.     

A minimal size for granular superconductors

We investigate the minimal size of small superconducting grains by means of a Ginzburg–Landau model confined to a sphere of radius R. This model is supposed to describe a material in the form of a ball, whose transition temperature when presented in bulk form, T₀, is known. We obtain an equation for the critical temperature as a function of R and of T₀, allowing us to obtain a minimal radius of the sphere below which no superconducting transition exists. An estimate of values of minimal radii for different materials is done.     

Magic doping fractions for high-temperature superconductors

We report hole-doping dependence of the in-plane resistivity rho(ab) in a cuprate superconductor La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO4, carefully examined using a series of high-quality single crystals. Our detailed measurements find a tendency towards charge ordering at particular rational hole-doping fractions of 1/16, 3/32, 1/8, and 3/16. This observation appears to suggest a specific form of charge order and is most consistent with the recent theoretical prediction of the checkerboard-type ordering of the Cooper pairs at rational doping fractions x = (2m+1)/2n, with integers m and n.     

Partially restricted Hartree-Fock method for singlet excited states

A version of the partially spin-restricted Hartree-Fock method is proposed to construct a reference Slater determinant in calculations of singlet excited states having the same symmetry as the ground one. On the one hand, this approach can be used for a rather simple, in comparison with the fully unrestricted determinant, construction of a pure spin state. On the other hand, it is suitable, in contrast to the Roothaan theory for open shells, for the development of the perturbation scheme for taking into account correlation effects in an excited state, which retains the calculation advantages of the Moller-Plesset perturbation theory with single annihilation for the ground state. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated by calculations of electronic excitation energies for BH and CH⁺ molecules.     

Magnetic superconductors

The old problem of the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism has obtained new interest since the discovery of the unusual magnetic and superconducting properties of some ternary compounds. In this report I want to discuss the influence of antiferromagnetic order on the superconducting state and, in particular, will compare different pairing approximations which have been proposed in the literature. Furthermore I will investigate the influence of fluctuations on the stability of the periodic spin structure and other superconducting phases at the onset of ferromagnetic order.