Abstract
THE discovery of conductivity1 in AxC60 (where A represents an alkali metal) and superconductivity2 in KxC60 has been followed by reports of superconductivity in other alkali-metal-doped full-erides with transition temperatures as high as 33 K (ref. 3). Elucidation of phase diagrams and understanding the relationship between structure and superconducting properties is essential to a detailed understanding of superconductivity in these systems. So far, structural data have been reported only for the non-conducting, intercalated body-centred cubic (b.c.c.) structures A6C60 (where A is K or Cs; ref. 4), a body-centred tetragonal structure for A6C60 (where A is K, Rb, Cs; ref. 5) and the superconducting, intercalated face-centred cubic (f.c.c.) material K3C60 (ref. 6). Here we report the preparation of a series of single-phase, isostructural f.c.c. superconductors with composition A3C60 (where A is K, Rb, Cs or a mixture of these), and show that Tcc increases monotonically with the size of the unit cell. Extended Hiickel band-structure calcula-tions also show a monotonic increase in the density of states at the Fermi level, N(EF), with lattice parameter. The primary impli-cation of these results is that all A3C60 superconductors have the same structure and that changes in Tc can be accounted for by changes in N(EF).
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Fleming, R., Ramirez, A., Rosseinsky, M. et al. Relation of structure and superconducting transition temperatures in A3C60. Nature 352, 787–788 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1038/352787a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/352787a0
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