We are delighted to announce, that after a few years of hard experimental work, our paper on the influence of strong coupling on the critical temperature of a superconductor has been eventually published, in a special issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics dealing with “Polaritonics for next generation materials”. And this is not an April fool despite its publication date, the first of April… This paper summarizes our attempts to modify the critical temperature of a superconductor, the Rb3C60, by using the cooperative coupling between one of its vibrational mode with a strong vibration of a polymer, and surface plasmons mode. Despite the numerous experimental issues due to the complexity of this system and of those measurements, we observed that for most of the samples we prepared, the Tc of the Rb3C60 was increasing from 30K to 45K. Our theorists colleagues have developed a simple model based on an enhancement of the electron-phonon coupling to explain those results. We thank all the collaborators who took part to the success of this project. Congratulations to all !
Source : The Journal of Chemical Physics