No Arabic abstract
Chiral superconductors exhibit novel transport properties that depend on the topology of the order parameter, topology of the Fermi surface, the spectrum of bulk and edge Fermionic excitations, and the structure of the impurity potential. In the case of electronic heat transport, impurities induce an anomalous (zero-field) thermal Hall conductivity that is easily orders of magnitude larger than the quantized edge contribution. The effect originates from branch-conversion scattering of Bogoliubov quasiparticles by the chiral order parameter, induced by potential scattering. The former transfers angular momentum between the condensate and the excitations that transport heat. The anomalous thermal Hall conductivity is shown to depend to the structure of the electron-impurity potential, as well as the winding number, $ u$, of the chiral order parameter, $Delta(p)=|Delta(p)|,e^{i uphi_{p}}$. The results provide quantitative formulae for interpreting heat transport experiments seeking to identify broken T and P symmetries, as well as the topology of the order parameter for chiral superconductors.
We report theoretical results for the electronic contribution to thermal and electrical transport for chiral superconductors belonging to even or odd-parity E$_1$ and E$_2$ representations of the tetragonal and hexagonal point groups. Chiral superconductors exhibit novel transport properties that depend on the topology of the order parameter, topology of the Fermi surface, the spectrum of bulk Fermionic excitations, and -- as we highlight -- the structure of the impurity potential. The anomalous thermal Hall effect is shown to be sensitive to the structure of the electron-impurity t-matrix, as well as the winding number, $ u$, of the chiral order parameter, $Delta(p)=|Delta(p)|,e^{i uphi_p}$. For heat transport in a chiral superconductor with isotropic impurity scattering, i.e., point-like impurities, a transverse heat current is obtained for $ u=pm 1$, but vanishes for $| u|>1$. This is not a universal result. For finite-size impurities with radii of order or greater than the Fermi wavelength, $Rgehbar/p_f$, the thermal Hall conductivity is finite for chiral order with $| u|ge2$, and determined by a specific Fermi-surface average of the differential cross-section for electron-impurity scattering. Our results also provide quantitative formulae for interpreting heat transport experiments for superconductors predicted to exhibit broken time-reversal and mirror symmetries.
Generic chiral superconductors with three-dimensional electronic structure have nodal gaps and are not strictly topological. Nevertheless, they exhibit a spontaneous thermal Hall effect (THE), i.e. a transverse temperature gradient in response to a heat current even in the absence of an external magnetic field. While in some cases this THE can be quantized analogous to the Quantum Hall effect, this is not the case for nodal superconductors in general. In this study we determine the spontaneous THE for tight binding models with tetragonal and hexagonal crystal symmetry with chiral $p$- and d-wave superconducting phase. At the zero-temperature limit, the thermal Hall conductivity $ kappa_{xy} $ provides information on the structure of the gap function on the Fermi surface and the Andreev bound states on the surface. The temperature dependence at very low temperatures is determined by the types of gap nodes, point or line nodes, leading to characteristic power law behaviors in the temperature, as known for other quantities such as specific heat or London penetration depth. The generic behavior is discussed on simple models analytically, while the analysis of the tight-binding models is given numerically.
We discuss the polar Kerr effect (PKE) in a chiral p-wave (p_x+i p_y-wave) superconductor. It is found that the off-diagonal component of a current-current correlation function is induced by impurity scattering in the chiral p-wave condensate, and a nonzero Hall conductivity is obtained using the Kubo formula. We estimate the Kerr rotation angle by using this impurity-induced Hall conductivity and compare it with experimental results [Jing Xia et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 167002 (2006)].
We predict an anomalous thermal Hall effect (ATHE) mediated by photons in networks of Weyl semi-metals. Contrary to the photon thermal Hall effect in magneto-optical systems which requires the application of an external magnetic field the ATHE in a Weyl semi-metals network is an intrinsic property of these systems. Since the Weyl semi-metals can exhibit a strong nonreciprocal response in the infrared over a broad spectral range the magnitude of thermal Hall flux in these systems can be relatively large compared to the primary flux. This ATHE paves the way for a directional control of heat flux by localy tuning the magnitude of temperature field without changing the direction of temperature gradient.
We show that a Weyl superconductor can absorb light via a novel surface-to-bulk mechanism, which we dub the topological anomalous skin effect. This occurs even in the absence of disorder for a single-band superconductor, and is facilitated by the topological splitting of the Hilbert space into bulk and chiral surface Majorana states. In the clean limit, the effect manifests as a characteristic absorption peak due to surface-bulk transitions. We also consider the effects of bulk disorder, using the Keldysh response theory. For weak disorder, the bulk response is reminiscent of the Mattis-Bardeen result for $s$-wave superconductors, with strongly suppressed spectral weight below twice the pairing energy, despite the presence of gapless Weyl points. For stronger disorder, the bulk response becomes more Drude-like and the $p$-wave features disappear. We show that the surface-bulk signal survives when combined with the bulk in the presence of weak disorder. The topological anomalous skin effect can therefore serve as a fingerprint for Weyl superconductivity. We also compute the Meissner response in the slab geometry, incorporating the effect of the surface states.