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Electrical control of the superconducting-to-insulating transition in graphene–metal hybrids

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 590–594 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Graphene1 is a sturdy and chemically inert material exhibiting an exposed two-dimensional electron gas of high mobility. These combined properties enable the design of graphene composites, based either on covalent2 or non-covalent3 coupling of adsorbates, or on stacked and multilayered heterostructures4. These systems have shown tunable electronic properties such as bandgap engineering3, reversible metal–insulating transition2,4 or supramolecular spintronics5. Tunable superconductivity is expected as well6, but experimental realization is lacking. Here, we show experiments based on metal–graphene hybrid composites, enabling the tunable proximity coupling of an array of superconducting nanoparticles of tin onto a macroscopic graphene sheet. This material allows full electrical control of the superconductivity down to a strongly insulating state at low temperature. The observed gate control of superconductivity results from the combination of a proximity-induced superconductivity generated by the metallic nanoparticle array with the two-dimensional and tunable metallicity of graphene. The resulting hybrid material behaves, as a whole, like a granular superconductor showing universal transition threshold and localization of Cooper pairs in the insulating phase. This experiment sheds light on the emergence of superconductivity in inhomogeneous superconductors, and more generally, it demonstrates the potential of graphene as a versatile building block for the realization of superconducting materials.

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Figure 1: Self-assembled graphene–tin nanohybrids.
Figure 2: Sheet resistance as a function of temperature for different gate voltages.
Figure 3: Sheet resistance as a function of gate voltage for different temperatures.
Figure 4: Localization of Cooper pairs under a magnetic field.
Figure 5: Universal scaling of the transition.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by ANR-BLANC SuperGraph, ERC Advanced Grant MolNanoSpin No. 226558 and the Cible programme from Région Rhone-Alpes. Samples were fabricated at the NANOFAB facility of the Néel Institute, the support team of which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank H. Arjmandi-Tash, N. Bendiab, H. Bouchiat, C. Chapelier, J. Coraux, M. V. Feigel’man, Ç.Ö. Girit, B. M. Kessler, L. Marty, A. Reserbat-Plantey, B. Sacépé, V. Sessi, W. Wernsdorfer and A. Zettl for help and stimulating discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Néel, CNRS-UJF-INP, BP 166, 38042 Grenoble cedex 9, France

    Adrien Allain, Zheng Han & Vincent Bouchiat

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  1. Adrien Allain
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  2. Zheng Han
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  3. Vincent Bouchiat
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Contributions

V.B. and A.A. conceived the experiments, Z.H. grew the graphene, A.A. and Z.H. fabricated the samples and carried out the measurements, A.A. and V.B. analysed the data and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Vincent Bouchiat.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Allain, A., Han, Z. & Bouchiat, V. Electrical control of the superconducting-to-insulating transition in graphene–metal hybrids. Nature Mater 11, 590–594 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3335

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