Are critical resistance and exponents at the 2D superconductor-insulator transition universal?

In plain words

Theory predicted that at the switch between superconductor and insulator the film resistance takes a universal value set by Planck constant and the electron charge, with simple scaling laws. Experiments find different values and exponents in different films.

Precise statement

The dirty-boson theory (Fisher 1990) predicts a universal critical sheet resistance $R_{c} = h/(4e^{2})$ and universal $z\nu$ at the B- or disorder-tuned transition. Measured $R_{c}$ varies by a factor of several and $z\nu$ ranges from $\sim 0.6$ to above 2; Ga films show a divergent effective $z\nu$ characteristic of a quantum Griffiths singularity (Xing et al. 2015). Classify the universality classes of the 2D transition with $1/r$ Coulomb interaction and quenched disorder, and determine whether $R_{c}$ and $z\nu$ are universal within each class.

What would settle it

Scaling analyses at $T$ far below the crossover scale in several material classes, with sample-to-sample comparison of $R_{c}$ and $z\nu$, matched to a theory assigning each to a class.

Status in the literature

Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.

A discontinuous (first-order) disorder-driven transition was reported in amorphous InOx films (Charpentier et al., Nature Physics 21, 104, 2025), which would place at least some films outside any continuous universality class.

Revision history

Results

No results have been posted on this problem yet.

Post a result · how results are checked

Sign in to follow or save this problem

See also

Comments (0)

Comments are not records: they are not signed, stamped or logged. How comments work

No comments yet.

Sign in to comment.