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Searching for natural materials exhibiting larger electron-electron interactions constitutes a traditional approach to high temperature superconductivity research. Very recently we pointed out that the newly developed field of electromagnetic metamaterials deals with the somewhat related task of dielectric response engineering on a sub-100 nm scale. Considerable enhancement of the electron-electron interaction may be expected in such metamaterial scenarios as in epsilon near zero (ENZ) and hyperbolic metamaterials. In both cases dielectric function may become small and negative in substantial portions of the relevant four-momentum space, leading to enhancement of the electron pairing interaction. This approach has been verified in experiments with aluminium-based metamaterials. Metamaterial superconductor with Tc = 3.9 K have been fabricated, that is three times that of pure aluminium (Tc = 1.2 K), which opens up new possibilities to considerably improve Tc of other simple superconductors. A theoretical model based on the Maxwell-Garnett approximation provides a microscopic explanation of this effect in terms of electron-electron pairing mediated by a hybrid plasmon-phonon excitation. We report the observations of this excitation in Al-Al2O3 core-shell metamaterials using inelastic neutron scattering. This result provides support for this novel mechanism of superconductivity in metamaterials. |
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