Superconducting gap of H3S measured by tunnelling spectroscopy

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Du, Feng; Drozdov, Alexander P.; Minkov, Vasily S.; Balakirev, Fedor F.; Kong, Panpan; Smith, G. Alexander; Yan, Jiafeng; Shen, Bin; Gegenwart, Philipp; Eremets, Mikhail I.
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; United States Department of Energy (DOE); Los Alamos National Laboratory; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Institute of Physics, CAS; Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS; Hanyang University; University of Augsburg
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-3320
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08895-2
• 发表日期: 2025-05-15
• 关键词: thermal agitation; shot-noise; temperature; hydride

摘要

Several hydrogen-rich superconductors have been found to show unprecedentedly high critical temperatures1, 2, 3-4, stimulating investigations into the nature of the superconductivity in these materials. Although their macroscopic superconducting properties are established1,5, 6-7, microscopic insights into the pairing mechanism remains unclear. Here we characterize the superconducting gap structure in the high-temperature superconductor H3S and its deuterium counterpart D3S by performing tunnelling spectroscopy measurements. The tunnelling spectra reveal that H3S and D3S both have a fully gapped structure, which could be well described by a single s-wave Dynes model, with gap values 2 Delta of approximately 60 meV and 44 meV, respectively. Furthermore, we observed gap features of another likely H-depleted HxS superconducting phase in a poorly synthesized hydrogen sulfide sample. Our work offers direct experimental evidence for superconductivity in the hydrogen-rich superconductor H3S from a microscopic perspective. It validates the phonon-mediated mechanism of superconducting pairing and provides a foundation for further understanding the origins of high-temperature superconductivity in hydrogen-rich compounds.