Gate-tunable superconductivity at SrTiO3 surface realized by Al layer evaporation.

Electronic properties of low dimensional superconductors are determined by many-body-effects. This physics has been studied traditionally with superconducting thin films and in recent times with two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at oxide interfaces. In this work, we show that a superconducting 2DEG can be generated by simply evaporating a thin layer of metallic Al under ultrahigh vacuum on a SrTiO 3 crystal, whereby Al oxidizes into amorphous insulating alumina, doping the SrTiO 3 surface with oxygen vacancies. The superconducting critical temperature of the resulting 2DEG is found to be tunable with a gate voltage with a maximum value of 360 mK. A gate-induced switching between superconducting and resistive states is demonstrated. Compared to conventionally-used pulsed-laser deposition, our work simplifies to a large extent the process of fabricating oxide-based superconducting 2DEGs. It will make such systems accessible to a broad range of experimental techniques useful to understand low-dimensional phase transitions and complex many-body-phenomena in electronic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]