Is there a metamaterial route to high temperature superconductivity?

Abstract

Superconducting properties of a material, such as electron-electron interactions and the critical temperature of superconducting transition can be expressed via the effective dielectric response function of the material. Such a description is valid on the spatial scales below the superconducting coherence length (the size of the Cooper pair), which equals ~100 nm in a typical BCS superconductor. Searching for natural materials exhibiting larger electron-electron interactions constitutes a traditional approach to high temperature superconductivity research. Here we point out that recently developed field of electromagnetic metamaterials deals with somewhat related task of dielectric response engineering on sub-100 nm scale. We argue that the metamaterial approach to dielectric response engineering may considerably increase the critical temperature of a composite superconductor-dielectric metamaterial.