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High-temperature superconductivity

Electron mirages in an iron salt

Nature volume 515, pages 205–206 (2014)Cite this article

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The detection of unusual 'mirage' energy bands in photoemission spectra of single-atom layers of iron selenide reveals the probable cause of high-temperature superconductivity in these artificial structures. See Letter p.245

Engineering artificial structures on the nanometre scale with the aim of controlling the quantum properties of their electrons is a mainstay of modern materials science. But it is a grand challenge to try to apply this technology to manipulate the rich, collective quantum phenomena of strongly interacting electron systems, because these systems invariably involve complicated chemistry that is hard to tame on the nanoscale. An iconic example of such phenomena is superconductivity (electrical conduction without resistance) in copper- and iron-based metallic salts at unusually high temperatures. Discovered1 in the 1980s, this type of superconductivity is still poorly understood2,3, and only in the past couple of years has it become possible to manufacture high-quality single-atom layers of an iron selenide superconductor4. The surprise is that these nanolayers superconduct at higher temperatures4,5 — perhaps6 up to a whopping 109 kelvin — than the rather poorly superconducting bulk form of this metallic salt. On page 245 of this issue, Lee et al.7 report data that seem to uncover the culprit behind this intriguing observation.

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  1. Jan Zaanen is at the Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands.,

    Jan Zaanen

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  1. Jan Zaanen
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Correspondence to Jan Zaanen.

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Zaanen, J. Electron mirages in an iron salt. Nature 515, 205–206 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/515205a

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