Tunable superconducting phase transition in metal-decorated graphene sheets.
Kessler BM., Girit CO., Zettl A., Bouchiat V.
We have produced graphene sheets decorated with a nonpercolating network of nanoscale tin clusters. These metal clusters both efficiently dope the graphene substrate and induce long-range superconducting correlations. We find that despite structural inhomogeneity on mesoscopic length scales (10-100 nm), this material behaves electronically as a homogenous dirty superconductor with a field-effect tuned Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. Our facile self-assembly method establishes graphene as an ideal tunable substrate for studying induced two-dimensional electronic systems at fixed disorder and our technique can readily be extended to other order parameters such as magnetism.