As much as we now know about superconductivity – where a material conducts electrical charge without resistance or heat loss – there remain long-standing mysteries about how the phenomenon works.
One of those mysteries centers around a group of superconducting materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).
In ultra-thin form, two of these TMDs appear to have just a single superconducting energy gap – one of the fingerprints physicists use to understand how electrons pair up in a superconductor.
The problem? Not all of the math fully added up to fit a single-band theory without a bit of approximation.
Now researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have found out why, publishing their results in Physical Review Letters: There appear to be two superconducting bands here, masquerading as one.
The two superconducting bands behave so much like one that their two energy gaps appear as a single gap in measurements.
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