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Organic materials

From insulator to superconductor

Nature volume 406, pages 687–688 (2000)Cite this article

There is a retraction (06 March 2003) associated with the Letter to Nature that is the subject of this article. Please click here to view.

The discovery in the late 1970s that certain types of polymeric material1 can conduct electricity almost as efficiently as copper wire paved the way for light-emitting diodes, electrical sensors and even rechargeable batteries made entirely from plastics. This success sparked general interest in electronic devices made from cheap organic materials, such as organic superconductors2. In a superconductor, electrons bind together to form Cooper pairs that carry current without resistance at sufficiently low temperatures. On page 702 of this issue3, Batlogg and his colleagues describe how to make superconducting transistors from anthracene, tetracene and pentacene. Under normal conditions, these simple organic materials are insulators, but they can be converted into superconductors simply by injecting them with charge and lowering the temperature.

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Figure 1: What lies behind the superconductivity of organic materials, such as polyacenes (anthracene) and fullerenes (C60)?

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  1. Loomis Laboratory of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1100 W. Green Street , Urbana, 61801-3080, Illinois, USA

    Philip Phillips

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  1. Philip Phillips
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Correspondence to Philip Phillips.

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Phillips, P. From insulator to superconductor. Nature 406, 687–688 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35021170

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