2018/08/15 by Myung‐Hwan Whangbo, Whangbo, Myung-Hwan
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphene research and applications #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #Thermal properties of materials
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.04959
openalex publication_date 2018/08/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently Kawashima has reported that, when wetted with alkanes, several forms of graphite and single-layer graphene exhibit superconductor-like properties above room temperature under ambient pressure [AIP Adv. 2013, 3, 052132; arXiv:1612.05294; arXiv:1801.09376]. Under the assumption that these seemingly unlikely properties arise from the presence of paired electrons brought about by the alkane-wetting, we explored their implications to arrive at a probable mechanism for strong electron-pairing driven by Fermi surface nesting and acoustic phonon. This mechanism explains why alkane-wetting is essential for the graphene systems to become superconductor-like above room temperature and why the Tc of alkane-wetted pitch-based graphite fibers increases almost linearly from 363 to 504 K with increasing the molecular weight of alkane from heptane to hexadecane. It also provides a number of experimentally-verifiable predictions, the confirmation of which will provide a strong support for the superconductivity driven by Fermi surface nesting and acoustic phonon.