Nanowerk  July 19, 2023 Spatial disorder has been shown to drive two-dimensional (2D) superconductors to an insulating phase through a superconductor–insulator transition (SIT). Numerical calculations predict that with increasing disorder, emergent electronic granularity is expected in these materials—a phenomenon where superconducting (SC) domains on the scale of the material’s coherence length are embedded in an insulating matrix and coherently coupled by Josephson tunneling. An international team of researchers (USA – SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Colombia) has shown spatially resolved scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) measurements of the three-dimensional (3D) superconductor BaPb1−xBixO3 (BPBO), which surprisingly demonstrated three key signatures of emergent electronic […]