The authors of the current study explored what happens when not two, but three graphene layers are stacked and twisted.
What if a material just a single atom thick could unlock the secrets of superconductivity, and open the door to powerful quantum devices? That’s the promise of a curious phenomenon discovered in specially arranged layers of graphene.
When stacked with just the right twist, this ultra-thin carbon material begins to conduct electricity with zero resistance, a property scientists have long sought to understand and control. However, the real mystery lies in how this happens. This twisted structure, called magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene , doesn’t behave like traditional superconductors. It breaks the usual rules, and no one fully understands why. This kind of superconductivity is called unconventional, and its inner mechanism has bewildered scientists for years. A team of researchers investigated this mystery by building tiny superconducting circuits with MATG. Their recently published study reveals how electrons behave in MATG and provides valuable insights into unconventional superconductors. The study authors suggest that this breakthrough could lead to better designs for future quantum technologies.Twisting graphene to reveal quantum secretsBack in 2018, a team of researchers stunned the scientific world by showing that two layers of graphene, when twisted at just the right angle , could turn into a superconductor. This special alignment, known as the magic angle, triggered superconductivity in a system that’s usually just a flat sheet of carbon atoms. Inspired by this, the authors of the current study explored what happens when not two, but three graphene layers are stacked and twisted . To understand how superconductivity works in this system, the researchers built tiny superconducting circuits known as Josephson junctions. These are devices where two superconductors are connected with a very thin, non-superconducting material in between. In their setup, the scientists used a standard superconductor as the two ends of the junction, while placing the MATG stack in the middle. If MATG behaved like a normal metal, the setup would be called an S-N-S junction . However, if MATG turned superconducting, it would create what’s called an S-S′-S junction .To see whether MATG was indeed superconducting, the team didn’t just measure the resistance drop. That alone wasn’t enough, as many materials can show low resistance without being true superconductors. So, they tested whether the material expelled magnetic fields and responded to current changes like an inductor . This resulted in Cooper pair formation, a hallmark of superconductivity, taking place in MATG. However, what stood out in their research was the measurement of something called kinetic inductance, which reflects how slowly Cooper pairs respond to changing currents due to their inertia. The team found that MATG had kinetic inductance values nearly 50 times higher than most known superconductors. That’s a big deal because high kinetic inductance is exactly what you want in devices like ultra-sensitive photon detectors and superconducting qubits used in quantum computers. Even more intriguing, they found a clear inverse relationship between the kinetic inductance and the critical current, the maximum current a material can carry while remaining superconducting. “This inverse relation between the kinetic inductance and the critical current also reveals the coherence length of the superconductor, roughly speaking, the ‘size’ of the electron pairs responsible for the superconducting state. We measure a larger coherence length than reported in earlier studies, using different experimental methods, on this material,” Christian Schönenberger, one of the study authors, said.The bright future of superconductivityThis study provides a new set of tools to study how unconventional superconductors work. For instance, it shows that by precisely measuring how easily electron pairs move and how far they stretch across the material, one can decode the inner mechanism that drives superconductivity in twisted graphene.However, there are limitations also. The twisted trilayer graphene used in the study doesn’t exist in nature, it has to be carefully assembled in the lab. It’s also delicate and prone to disorder, which makes it difficult to scale for real-world applications. Still, the study opens new avenues to explore other, more practical materials that behave in similar ways. “We believe that our study will lead to small steps in the direction of providing hints for understanding superconductivity in these materials and perhaps towards the search for other novel superconductors,” Schönenberger said.The team now plans to test how MATG behaves under high-frequency conditions, so that one day it could be used in quantum circuits.The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Physics Qauntum Superconductivity Twisted Graphene
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