| Author(s): |
Luís Augusto Gomes Báring
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin |
| Defense date: | 18 dez. 2012 |
| Examining board members: |
Paulo Pureur Neto;
Enzo Granato;
Eduardo Granado Monteiro da Silva;
Ricardo Rodrigues Urbano
|
| Advisor: | Iakov Veniaminovitch Kopelevitch |
| Abstract | |
In this work we studied the semimetals bismuth Bi, antimony Sb and Bi1-xSbx, all of them with non-trivial topologic properties. We observed an intrinsic superconductivity in bismuth, with TC »= 8:5 K. The phasediagram of the critical field H versus the temperature T, based upon the magnetization and resistance data, may be well fitted according to theoretical models valid for granular superconductivity. We also detected, in bismuth, the increase of the Josephson current and interganular coupling in the quantum limit due to Landau quantization. This manifests itself as a reentrant superconducting state. Our results revealed a metal-insulator transition triggered by magnetic field, for all the studied materials. The phase diagram H ¡T shows a striking similarity between them. The sample Bi1-xSbx with x = 0:052 demonstrated a semimetal-insulator transition even at zero field. We compared our results with previous results of other groups and analyzed the temperature dependence of the transition as a function of the antimony amount x and the magnetic field B and demonstrated their similarity. We also observed supeerconductivity in the semimetals bismuth, antimony and Bi1-xSbx, triggered by doping with the metals gold and indium, and showed that the superconductivity is associated to the interface between the metals and the semimetals. Finally, we found the superconductivity induced by the aplication of magnetic field in bismuth, consistent with the Majorana fermions present in the interface between this material and the silver paste contacts. This may also be related to a non-equilibrium superconduting state (AU) | |