Science Daily March 3, 2020
The creation of collective behavior is the fundamental building block from which superconductivity emerges. A team of researchers in the US (University of Illinois at Chicago, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University) had theoretically predicted in a Kondo droplet, for certain distances between the cobalt atoms, the nanoscopic system should start to exhibit collective behavior, while for other distances, it should not. They confirmed the predictions by experiments that showed that collective behavior appears in Kondo droplets containing as little as 37 cobalt atoms. It allows us to move one step closer to developing the theory that describes the process of how materials could become superconducting at room temperature…read more. Open Access TECHNUCAL ARTICLE
Cobalt atoms (red) are placed on a copper surface (green) one at a time to form a Kondo droplet, leading to a collective pattern that is the fundamental building block of superconductivity. Credit: Dirk Morr