Biomaterial Database

Doping-Induced Superconductivity in the van der Waals Superatomic Crystal Re6Se8Cl2. 2020

Evan J Telford, and Jake C Russell, and Joshua R Swann, and Brandon Fowler, and Xiaoman Wang, and Kihong Lee, and Amirali Zangiabadi, and Kenji Watanabe, and Takashi Taniguchi, and Colin Nuckolls, and Patrick Batail, and Xiaoyang Zhu, and Jonathan A Malen, and Cory R Dean, and Xavier Roy

Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, United States.

Superatomic crystals are composed of discrete modular clusters that emulate the role of atoms in traditional atomic solids. Owing to their unique hierarchical structures, these materials are promising candidates to host exotic phenomena, such as doping-induced superconductivity and magnetism. Low-dimensional superatomic crystals in particular hold great potential as electronic components in nanocircuits, but the impact of doping in such compounds remains unexplored. Here we report the electrical transport properties of Re6Se8Cl2, a two-dimensional superatomic semiconductor. We find that this compound can be n-doped in situ through Cl dissociation, drastically altering the transport behavior from semiconducting to metallic and giving rise to superconductivity with a critical temperature of ∼8 K and upper critical field exceeding 30 T. This work is the first example of superconductivity in a van der Waals superatomic crystal; more broadly, it establishes a new chemical strategy to manipulate the electronic properties of van der Waals materials with labile ligands.