Owing to recent observations of superconductivity in quasi-onedimensional (1D) systems, Josephson arrays composed of aligned and weakly coupled 1D superconducting nanowires have attracted renewed interest for modeling the experimental data. Carrying out Monte Carlo simulations, we go beyond the traditional mean field results to show that the competition between 1D fluctuations and the transverse Josephson coupling between the nanowires can lead to a 1D-3D crossover transition at a temperature T c below the mean field T O C of the wires, with interesting and surprising pre-transitional characteristics. In particular, the specific heat exhibits a rounded peak between T c and T O C , and the phase correlation length within the transverse ab plane diverges at T c from above, in a manner consistent with that of a 2D Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless 4 These authors contributed equally to this work.

Calculations and detailed first principle and thermodynamic analyses have been performed to understand the formation mechanism of K2Ti6O13 nanowires (NWs) by a hydrothermal reaction between bulk Na2Ti3O7 crystals and a KOH solution. It is found that direct ion exchange between K+ and Na+ plus H+ interactions with [TiO6] octahedra in Na2Ti3O7 promote the formation of an intermediate H2K2Ti6O14 phase. The large lattice mismatch between this intermediate phase and the bulk Na2Ti3O7 structure, and the large energy reduction associated with the formation of this intermediate phase, drive the splitting of the bulk crystal into H2K2Ti6O14 NWs. However, these NWs are not stable because of large [TiO6] octahedra distortion and are subject to a dehydration process, which results in uniform K2Ti6O13 NWs with narrowly distributed diameters of around 10 nm.

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By performing second-order renormalization group analysis on thin arrays of 4-Angstrom (5,0) carbon nanotubes (CNTs) embedded in aluminophosphate-five (AFI) zeolite crystals, we identify singlet superconductivity instability to be dominant at low temperatures, attributable to the screening of the electron-electron Coulomb interaction in the array configuration. Our analysis also shows that there is a crossover as the system scales to lower energy/temperatures, whereby one-dimensional (1D) superconductivity is the ground state, but the response function of the Peierls distortion/charge density wave (CDW) order dominates at the higher energy regime. This crossover behavior indicates that for a thin array of (5,0) CNTs the CDW order may represent an excited state of the array, so that the CDW characteristics can appear at finite temperatures, in conjunction with 1D superconductivity. Experimental results are presented to support this interpretation.