Multiphase superconductivity in PdBi2
| Autor: | Powell, Lewis, Kuang, Wenjun, Hawkins-Pottier, Gabriel, Jalil, Rashid, Birkbeck, John, Jiang, Ziyi, Kim, Minsoo, Zou, Yichao, Komrakova, Sofiia, Haigh, Sarah, Timokhin, Ivan, Balakrishnan, Geetha, Geim, Andre K., Walet, Niels, Principi, Alessandro, Grigorieva, Irina V. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| Popis: | Unconventional superconductivity, where electron pairing does not involve electron-phonon interactions, is often attributed to magnetic correlations in a material. Well known examples include high-T_c cuprates and uranium-based heavy fermion superconductors. Less explored are unconventional superconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling, where interactions between spin-polarised electrons and external magnetic field can result in multiple superconducting phases and field-induced transitions between them, a rare phenomenon in the superconducting state. Here we report a magnetic-field driven phase transition in \beta-PdBi2, a layered non-magnetic superconductor. Our tunnelling spectroscopy on thin PdBi2 monocrystals incorporated in planar superconductor-insulator-normal metal junctions reveals a marked discontinuity in the superconducting properties with increasing in-plane field, which is consistent with a transition from conventional (s-wave) to nodal pairing. Our theoretical analysis suggests that this phase transition may arise from spin polarisation and spin-momentum locking caused by locally broken inversion symmetry, with p-wave pairing becoming energetically favourable in high fields. Our findings also reconcile earlier predictions of unconventional multigap superconductivity in \beta-PdBi2 with previous experiments where only a single s-wave gap could be detected. Comment: 29 pages, including 4 main Figures, Methods, 8 Supplementary Figures and 5 Supplementary Notes |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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