Interference-induced surface superconductivity:Enhancement by tuning the Debye energy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that interference effects can significantly enhance surface superconductivity temperatures, with increases up to nearly 70%, and this enhancement is robust across various microscopic parameters.

Contribution

It reveals that interference-induced enhancement of surface superconductivity can be much larger than previously observed, up to nearly 70%, and persists across a wide range of parameters.

Findings

Surface superconductivity can be enhanced by interference effects up to 70%.

The interference-induced enhancement persists over various microscopic parameters.

Previous enhancements were limited to 20-25%, now shown to be much larger.

Abstract

In the usual perception, surface superconductivity is associated with the surface nucleation of a superconducting condensate above the upper critical field in type-II superconductors or with a rearrangement of phonon properties and the electron-phonon coupling near surfaces/interfaces. Recently, it has been found that there is another example when the surface superconducting temperature is increased up to 20-25% as compared to the bulk one due to constructive interference of superconducting pair states. In the present work, we demonstrate that in fact, such an interferenceinduced enhancement can be much more pronounced, up to nearly 70%. Furthermore, here it is shown that such an interference enhancement persists over a wide range of microscopic parameters.