Interface superconductivity: the new old story

TL;DR

This paper discusses the historical and recent observations of interface superconductivity, highlighting its potential role in enhancing superconducting transition temperatures in layered materials and emphasizing its commonality across different systems.

Contribution

It revisits and interprets early experimental results on interface-enhanced superconductivity, connecting them to recent discoveries in layered high-Tc materials.

Findings

Enhanced Tc observed at interfaces with silver coverage

Magnetic properties detected at YBCO/Ag interfaces

Historical data suggest interface effects are common in layered superconductors

Abstract

Recently there is a great excitation about enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature in bilayer LaSrCuO materials. Responsible for this phenomenon is probably the interface superconductivity, predicted by Ginzburg in 1964. The interface-superconductivity-like effects were already observed in conventional superconductors. In 1990 we observed that the superconducting critical temperature of both sides (interface and surface) of the high-Tc films can be different and we have found an enhancement of the Tc if the films are covered with silver. Our interpretation is that we observe an interface (surface) enhanced superconductivity on the interface side by the substrate and on the surface by the silver. In the annealed YBCO/Ag bilayers magnetic properties of the interface were observed. Unfortunately two of our papers were not accepted for publication and only the paper presented on SQUID 91 conference was published. Now after 19 years I would like to show some of these old unpublished results and to point out that the observed phenomena are probably a common feature of such layer systems.