Quantum-Phase Electronics Center (QPEC) and Department of Applied Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Nat Commun. 2017 Feb 16;8:14465. doi: 10.1038/ncomms14465.
Chirality of materials are known to affect optical, magnetic and electric properties, causing a variety of nontrivial phenomena such as circular dichiroism for chiral molecules, magnetic Skyrmions in chiral magnets and nonreciprocal carrier transport in chiral conductors. On the other hand, effect of chirality on superconducting transport has not been known. Here we report the nonreciprocity of superconductivity-unambiguous evidence of superconductivity reflecting chiral structure in which the forward and backward supercurrent flows are not equivalent because of inversion symmetry breaking. Such superconductivity is realized via ionic gating in individual chiral nanotubes of tungsten disulfide. The nonreciprocal signal is significantly enhanced in the superconducting state, being associated with unprecedented quantum Little-Parks oscillations originating from the interference of supercurrent along the circumference of the nanotube. The present results indicate that the nonreciprocity is a viable approach toward the superconductors with chiral or noncentrosymmetric structures.
材料的手性已知会影响光学、磁性和电性，导致各种非平凡现象，例如手性分子的圆二色性、手性磁斯格明子和手性导体中的非互易载流子输运。另一方面，手性对超导输运的影响尚不清楚。在这里，我们报告了超导的非互易性——这是超导手性结构的明确证据，其中由于反转对称性破缺，前向和后向超导电流不等。这种超导是通过二硫化钨的单个手性纳米管中的离子门控实现的。在超导状态下，非互易信号显著增强，与源自纳米管圆周上超导电流干涉的前所未有的量子小泊松振荡有关。本研究结果表明，非互易性是一种可行的方法，可以实现具有手性或非中心对称结构的超导体。
Zotero 插件
