No Arabic abstract
Searching for topological insulators/superconductors is one central subject in recent condensed matter physics. As a theoretical aspect, various classification methods of symmetry-protected topological phases have been developed, where the topology of a gapped Hamiltonian is investigated from the viewpoint of its onsite/crystal symmetry. On the other hand, topological physics also appears in semimetals, whose gapless points can be characterized by topological invariants. Stimulated by the backgrounds, we shed light on the topology of nodal superconductors. In this paper, we review our modern topological classification theory of superconducting gap nodes in terms of symmetry. The classification method elucidates nontrivial gap structures arising from nonsymmorphic symmetry or angular momentum, which cannot be predicted by a conventional theory.
The theory of symmetry indicators has enabled database searches for topological materials in normal conducting phases, which has led to several encyclopedic topological material databases. Here, based on recently developed symmetry indicators for superconductors, we report our comprehensive search for topological and nodal superconductors among nonmagnetic materials in Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. A myriad of topological superconductors with exotic boundary states are discovered. When materials are symmetry-enforced nodal superconductors, positions and shapes of the nodes are also identified. These data are aggregated at Database of Topological and Nodal Supercoductors. We also provide a subroutine Topological Supercon, which allows users to examine the topological nature in the superconducting phase of any material themselves by uploading the result of first-principles calculations as an input. Our database and subroutine, when combined with experiments, will help us understand the unconventional pairing mechanism and facilitate realizations of the long-sought Majorana fermions promising for topological quantum computations.
We establish quasi-two-dimensional thin films of iron-based superconductors (FeSCs) as a new high-temperature platform for hosting intrinsic time-reversal-invariant helical topological superconductivity (TSC). Based on the combination of Dirac surface state and bulk extended $s$-wave pairing, our theory should be directly applicable to a large class of experimentally established FeSCs, opening a new TSC paradigm. In particular, an applied electric field serves as a topological switch for helical Majorana edge modes in FeSC thin films, allowing for an experimentally feasible design of gate-controlled helical Majorana circuits. Applying an in-plane magnetic field drives the helical TSC phase into a higher-order TSC carrying corner-localized Majorana zero modes. Our proposal should enable the experimental realization of helical Majorana fermions.
The Higgs mode associated with amplitude fluctuations of the superconducting gap in uniform superconductors usually is heavy, which makes its excitation and detection difficult. We report on the existence of a gapless Higgs mode in the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov states. This feature is originated from the Goldstone mode associated with the translation symmetry breaking. The existence of the gapless Higgs mode is demonstrated by using both a phenomenological model and microscopic Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. The gapless Higgs mode can avoid the decay into other low energy excitations, which renders it stable and detectable.
Fully gapped two-dimensional superconductors coupled to dynamical electromagnetism are known to exhibit topological order. In this work, we develop a unified low-energy description for spin-singlet paired states by deriving topological Chern-Simons field theories for $s$-wave, $d+id$, and chiral higher even-wave superconductors. These theories capture the quantum statistics and fusion rules of Bogoliubov quasiparticles and vortices and incorporate global continuous symmetries - specifically, spin rotation and conservation of magnetic flux - present in all singlet superconductors. For all such systems, we compute the Hall response for these symmetries and investigate the physics at the edge. In particular, the weakly-coupled phase of a chiral $d+id$ chiral state has a spin Hall coefficient $ u_s=2$ and a vanishing Hall response for the magnetic flux symmetry. We argue that the latter is a generic result for two-dimensional superconductors with gapped photons, thereby demonstrating the absence of a spontaneous magnetic field in the ground state of chiral superconductors. It is also shown that the Chern-Simons theories of chiral spin-singlet superconductors derived here fall into Kitaevs 16-fold classification of topological superconductors.
We present a theory of magnetic response in a finite-size two-dimensional superconductors with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The interplay between the latter and an in-plane Zeeman field leads on the one hand to an out-of-plane spin polarization which accumulates at the edges of the sample over the superconducting coherence length, and on the other hand, to circulating supercurrents decaying away from the edge over a macroscopic scale. In a long finite stripe of width W both, the spin polarization and the currents, contribute to the total magnetic moment induced at the stripe ends. These two contributions scale with W and W2 respectively, such that for sufficiently large samples it can be detected by current magnetometry techniques.