Magnetization of small lead particles

Abstract

The magnetization of an ensemble of isolated lead grains of sizes ranging from below 6 nm to 1000 nm is measured. A sharp disappearance of Meissner effect with lowering of the grain size is observed for the smaller grains. This is a direct observation by magnetization measurement of the occurrence of a critical particle size for superconductivity, which is consistent with Anderson's criterion.

7 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to PRL

References in corpus (4)

• Spectroscopy of discrete energy levels in ultrasmall metallic grains
• Gate-Voltage Studies of Discrete Electronic States in Al Nanoparticles
• Molecular dynamics simulations of lead clusters
• Universal transport in 2D granular superconductors

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Upper critical field in nanostructured Nb: Competing effects of the reduction in density of states and the mean free path
• Size induced metal insulator transition in nanostructured Niobium thin films: Intragranular and intergranular contributions
• Competing effects of surface phonon softening and quantum size effects on the superconducting properties of nanostructured Pb
• BCS superconductivity in metallic nanograins: Finite-size corrections, low energy excitations, and robustness of shell effects
• Observation of magnetism in Au thin films
• Superconducting parity effect across the Anderson limit
• Random Matrix Crossovers and Quantum Critical Crossovers for Interacting Electrons in Quantum Dots
• Intermediate State in Type I superconducting sphere: pinning and size effect
• Pair correlations and the survival of superconductivity in and around a super-conducting impurity
• Superconducting fluctuations in small grains - the Universal Hamiltonian and the reduced BCS model
• Reentrant superconductivity in YBa${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_{7-d}$ microstructured particles