Utilization of the superatom concept in search of higher critical temperature superconductivity

Research Project, 2013 – 2016

A *super-atom* conceptual interface between chemistry and physics has been formulated in order to assist in the search for higher TC superconductors. The plaquettes generating the checkerboard superstructure in the cuprates, the C60 molecules in K3C60, and the Mo6S82- clusters in Chevrel phase materials offer such candidate super-atoms. The high-TC superconductivity HTSC is articulated as the entanglement of two disjoint electronic manifolds in the vicinity of a common Fermi energy. The resulting HTSC ground state couples near-degenerate protected local superatom states to virtual magnons in an antiferromagnetic AFM embedding. The composite Cooper pairs emerge as the interaction particles for virtual magnons mediated *self-coherent entanglement* of super-atom states. A resonating valence bond formalism is employed in order to illustrate the real-space Cooper pairs as well as their delocalization and Bose Einstein condensation on a ring of super-atoms. The chemical potential for Cooper pairs joining the condensate is formulated in terms of the super-exchange interaction, and consequently the TC in terms of the Neél temperature. The robustness of the HTSC ground state is owing to local maximum *electron correlation entropy* at the expense of non-local phase rigidity. Our superatom understanding will be applied to arrays of self-assembled nano-particles as well as to dopant guided electronic superstructures in solids in search of superconductivity at higher temperatures.