Observation of Coulomb blockade and Coulomb staircases in superconducting Pr0.8Sr0.2NiO2 films

Autor:	Wang, Rui-Feng, Xiong, Yan-Ling, Yan, Hang, Hu, Xiaopeng, Osada, Motoki, Li, Danfeng, Hwang, Harold Y., Song, Can-Li, Ma, Xu-Cun, Xue, Qi-Kun
Rok vydání:	2023
Předmět:	Condensed Matter - Superconductivity Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevB.107.115411
Popis:	Motivated by the discovery of superconductivity in the infinite-layer nickelate family, we report an experimental endeavor to clean the surface of nickelate superconductor Pr0.8Sr0.2NiO2 films by Ar+ ion sputtering and subsequent annealing, and we study their electronic structures by cryogenic scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. The annealed surfaces are characterized by nano-sized clusters and Coulomb staircases with periodicity inversely proportional to the projected area of the nanoclusters, consistent with a double-barrier tunneling junction model. Moreover, the dynamical Coulomb blockade effects are observed and result in well-defined energy gaps around the Fermi level, which correlate closely with the specific configuration of the junctions. These Coulomb blockade-related phenomena provide an alternative plausible cause of the observed gap structure that should be considered in the spectroscopic understanding of nickelate superconductors with the nano-clustered surface. Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05094 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv