Is There a Metamaterial Route to High Temperature Superconductivity?

Abstract EN

Superconducting properties of a material such as electron-electron interactions and the critical temperature of superconducting transition can be expressed via the effective dielectric response function εeff (q,ω) of the material.

Such a description is valid on the spatial scales below the superconducting coherence length (the size of the Cooper pair), which equals ∼100 nm in a typical BCS superconductor.

Searching for natural materials exhibiting larger electron-electron interactions constitutes a traditional approach to high temperature superconductivity research.

Here we point out that recently developed field of electromagnetic metamaterials deals with somewhat related task of dielectric response engineering on sub-100 nm scale.

We argue that the metamaterial approach to dielectric response engineering may considerably increase the critical temperature of a composite superconductor-dielectric metamaterial.