Publication Date:
2004-12-14
Description:
We have fabricated ultrathin lead films on silicon substrates with atomic-scale control of the thickness over a macroscopic area. We observed oscillatory behavior of the superconducting transition temperature when the film thickness was increased by one atomic layer at a time. This oscillating behavior was shown to be a manifestation of the Fabry-Perot interference modes of electron de Broglie waves (quantum well states) in the films, which modulate the electron density of states near the Fermi level and the electron-phonon coupling, which are the two factors that control superconductivity transitions. This result suggests the possibility of modifying superconductivity and other physical properties of a thin film by exploiting well-controlled and thickness-dependent quantum size effects.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Guo, Yang -- Zhang, Yan-Feng -- Bao, Xin-Yu -- Han, Tie-Zhu -- Tang, Zhe -- Zhang, Li-Xin -- Zhu, Wen-Guang -- Wang, E G -- Niu, Qian -- Qiu, Z Q -- Jia, Jin-Feng -- Zhao, Zhong-Xian -- Xue, Qi-Kun -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Dec 10;306(5703):1915-7.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15591197" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
